On Wednesday, February 19 at the Krewe of Nyx parade in Uptown New Orleans, Geraldine Carmauche was tragically killed when trying to cross between two sections of a float. Three nights later during the Endymion Parade in Mid-City, Joe Sampson died in a sadly similar manner. Not since 1981 when two children lost their lives had anyone been killed by a float during Mardi Gras.

To be sure, carnival season has witnessed horror more recently, from shootings to drunk drivers plowing into crowds and killing cyclists. For many New Orleanians, though, the deaths of Carmauche and Sampson felt distinctly different: they were killed by one of the most recognizable symbols of Mardi Gras itself. By the time news of Sampson’s death hit, people across the city were discussing whether Mardi Gras 2020 was accursed.

And there was broad agreement about the origins of the curse. Sitting in the Northwest corner of the French Quarter is the hulking carcass of the collapsed Hard Rock Hotel construction project. Taller than any nearby building to its north, south, and west, it dominates the city’s skyline from all three directions. At least three people died when the hotel construction project came crashing down on October 12, 2019. More than five months later, two bodies covered by tarps remain on the undemolished site, occasionally visible to passersby after a strong wind.

We say at least because persistent rumors among New Orleanians suggest that because the collapse occurred on a Saturday, there were more undocumented laborers than usual that day as workers brought friends to the site to do extra work under the table. It’s possible, perhaps likely, that more bodies lie in the rubble and that the friends and family of the deceased have not come forward for fear of deportation. Indeed, the hero of the collapse, construction laborer Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma — who had repeatedly complained of safety violations and the day before the disaster warned supervisors of floors shaking as if in an earthquake — was detained by ICE two days after the collapse and deported to his native Honduras in November.

For those inclined toward portentousness, superstition, or perhaps just karmic comeuppance, the fact that at least two bodies literally hovered over this year’s Mardi Gras was all the explanation for the tragedies at Nyx and Endymion they needed. Repeated labor and safety complaints before the collapse as well as the fact that the site’s developers had contributed at least $69,000 to Mayor Latoya Cantrell only intensified the feeling that God’s wrath arrived before Ash Wednesday this year.

Yet for all the talk of curses and spells, the irony was that our notion of an accursed Mardi Gras grew out of a sophisticated and growing public outrage over the underlying conditions that caused the disaster. Initially quiescent — “terrible, but these things occasionally happen everywhere” — as the bodies remained entombed in the undemolished rubble of the site for month after month, New Orleanians began to ask more questions and peel back the layers of the rotten onion.

On barstools and front porches from late 2019 onward, the Hard Rock tragedy was sparking the kinds of political discussion usually considered impolite in such spaces. The plight of the undocumented; endemic labor and workplace safety violations; pay-to-play politics; an economy built on low-wage labor in tourism and hospitality; a local political class beholden to developers and aloof from popular constituencies — all were topics of growing quotidian conversation. And if there was a hex on Mardi Gras 2020, then its origin lay in our political inability to ameliorate these conditions that preexisted the collapse.

In the last week, global attention has been laser-trained on this year’s carnival season, though the political crime of the Hard Rock collapse has not been the subject. Stories in every major US news outlet from Fox News to the Washington Post — with a flagship article in the New York Times — have sought to trace the severity of the local and national COVID-19 outbreak to Mardi Gras and its crowds. Whereas local discussion of the tragedies of Mardi Gras 2020 was marked by a growing analytic sophistication in service of a quasi-superstitious lesson in collective political failure, these analyses are marked by simple but dangerous vapidity. They exude recycled and anti-intellectual bromides of Louisiana exceptionalism and authenticity, a thin veneer of coastal elitism and hypocrisy, and a deep unwillingness to grapple with political and social causation.

These stories do nothing to help us understand the sources of the rapidly unfolding public health crisis in New Orleans or the nation at large. Their focus on Mardi Gras as a central cause of the city’s explosive rate of COVID-19 cases distracts us from the real causes: the deep class divides and weakened public health infrastructure that defines New Orleans and has made it synonymous with American inequality for at least fifteen years. New Orleans and Louisiana were of course far from bastions of equality before August of 2005. Nevertheless, as we have both repeatedly argued, far from being exceptional Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath presaged worsening conditions across the rest of the nation in the years since the failure of the federal levees.

When we widen our view, the idea that Mardi Gras, New Orleans’s population density, the city’s culture, or its tourism industry per se are meaningful sources of causation is both absurd and dangerous. Other US cities are more populated and more densely so. Many are more international, play host to exponentially larger volumes of tourists, and unlike New Orleans, are hubs of aviation transportation. Other cities hosted large public events at the same time as this year’s Mardi Gras celebrations. While Mardi Gras certainly attracts thousands of tourists, it remains above all a local and regional celebration, unlike many other large events across the country.

Miami hosted the Super Bowl LIV in early February, which attracted over 62,000 spectators for the game itself, not to mention the many other events before and after. The Daytona 500 auto race drew 100,000 spectators in late February, many thousands of whom were tightly packed in tents and RVs in the racetrack’s oval for days surrounding the race. As Mardi Gras weekend kicked off in New Orleans, thousands were visiting Chicago for the National Basketball Association’s All-Star weekend, packing bars and restaurants as well as the many fan events, concerts, exhibition games, and press junkets held in stadiums and pop-up venues scattered across the city.

Other cities, too, have expressive public cultures defined by dense public gatherings. Reading the national articles, though, Louisianans could be forgiven for recalling those dollar-store preachers who argued that Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution for the next weekend’s pro-LGBTQ Southern Decadence Festival and the city’s broader sinfulness.

No, the difference in spread and mortality in Louisiana that these articles purport to analyze is not because of culture, whether celebrated as some sort of authentic, calcified premodern ethos or decried for its blasphemy or wickedness. It lies in the very political problems of deep inequality, health care privatization, and class schisms that define this city and the nation as a whole. Paeans to street life, “expression[s] of joy,” and “the way people connect culturally” don’t simply distract from underlying causes, they are themselves an underlying cause.