The pandemic has been both a bad and an embarrassing time to be an American. Bad in an actuarial sense, because per-capita death rates here have been among the highest in the world. Embarrassing at the level of national identity. In Washington, last year, the President promised that the virus would be gone by Easter, and when it wasn’t he mused that Americans might self-treat with bleach. In Michigan, armed men guarded a barbershop that had defied public-health orders to close. On South Padre Island, in Texas, spring break proceeded as usual—packed and unmasked—even as cases were climbing. The state’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, insisted that there were “more important things than living”; later, he urged Texans to keep the economy open even if it meant more deaths. In cities everywhere, the virus followed the furrows of racism and inequity; Black and Hispanic people suffered the most from the disease and women from the economic aftermath. Churches sought exceptions from bans on gatherings that applied to everyone else. The news unfolded with the juxtaposed clarity of a historical montage: the death counts were mounting, even as resistance to public-health measures defined the political debate. The rich retreated to second homes and the beach. Even in dying, we couldn’t manage collective action. It seemed so finally, depressingly American—a mistrustful, poorly led, decentralized, and historically libertarian country that couldn’t even put on a cloth mask without making a national political fight about it.
And yet, for all the crowdsourced, up-to-the-minute dashboards of deaths and hospitalizations and vaccinations, the elegant, colored curves showing the arc of the disease in Lombardy or Louisiana, it’s been surprisingly tricky for epidemiologists to pinpoint exactly where these American idiosyncrasies mattered. Some of the obvious candidates don’t pan out. Donald Trump refused to wear a mask, but so, for a time, did Angela Merkel. Despite the surreal intensity of the anti-lockdown protests, cell-phone data show that Americans really did stick close to home when they were asked to, and even our adherence to masking was as good as or better than in comparable countries. The United States is rolling out vaccines faster than any other country, except for Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. As deeply rooted as the resistance to vaccination can seem here, it is worse elsewhere—in France, sixty per cent say they might refuse. The pressure on hospitals in the U.S. has been easing, and new case counts are in slow decline. But take the American experience of the past year, marked as it was by cycles of sickness, death, resentment, and shame, and compare it with others around the world, and an entirely different story emerges.
Historians are just now beginning to assemble it. This past week, I read “Fighting the First Wave,” Peter Baldwin’s comparative history of the approaches to the coronavirus taken by countries around the world, to be published in April, by Cambridge University Press. Baldwin, a historian at U.C.L.A., is less interested in how successfully nations have prevented infection and death than in their different approaches to social control. And, though Baldwin has a general disdain for the American response, which he views as slow and lacking in any kind of centralized plan, he tends to view the errors made here as unexceptional. In Baldwin’s account, the most “American” response—which is to say, the most bullheaded and self-certain—was conceived not in Washington but in Stockholm, where public-health officials spent months insisting that a broad lockdown was not necessary, because Swedes could be trusted to regulate themselves. (They couldn’t.) Baldwin quotes one of them, Johan Giesecke, Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist, sounding positively Texan: “The reason Sweden’s strategy distinguishes itself internationally is because everyone else is wrong.”
Baldwin is full of fun contempt for the Swedes. About the broader picture, he is more measured, writing, “Nations’ political identities seem, in fact, to have had only a passing relationship to the approach they chose or their success in tackling the pandemic.” Conservative governments in the United States and Brazil resisted shutdowns, but so did socialistic ones in Sweden and the Netherlands. Authoritarian governments, such as China’s and Saudi Arabia’s, acted aggressively to curtail individual liberties and seal off internal and external travel, but so did famously liberal ones, such as in New Zealand, where, in April and May, there were days when not a single traveller arrived from overseas, and in Germany, where authorities could rely on an expansive public-health law. “Patients who failed to follow instructions on isolating could be confined to an institution,” Baldwin writes. “Prison and fines were threatened. Establishments could be shut, assemblies forbidden, freedom of movement restricted.”
What mattered more than political identity was speed. Baldwin sets a point of departure at the third death in a given country or region—how quickly the government responded at that point established a pattern for how it would respond throughout. “The UK, Italy, and France were laggards, waiting almost two weeks to shut down shops and movement. Spain, Belgium, and Greece were faster.” New York imposed its lockdown on March 22nd, a week later than the Bay Area, a decision that translated to fifty per cent more cases two months down the road. Act fast—as China did, and South Korea, and Taiwan—and you could plausibly quarantine the disease, cutting off hard-hit areas, tracing outbreaks, and accomplishing the age-old public-health goal of separating the sick from the well. Act too slow, as most Western countries did, and you had two bad choices: try to manage the spread of the illness just enough to keep it from overwhelming hospitals, or shut down society and accept the economic devastation to come.
Within those choices, which Baldwin calls “the pandemic dilemma,” was the question of how much a government believed that citizens would voluntarily manage their own behavior. “One might call this trust, as the Swedes did,” Baldwin writes. Outside of Sweden, too, authorities hesitated on this point. Were stricter controls really necessary? Couldn’t people be nudged toward taking responsibility? Maybe, in another epidemic, they could. But “the fly in voluntarism’s ointment,” as Baldwin puts it, was the prevalence of asymptomatic transmission—a feature of the virus that was not initially clear. Even perfectly intentioned citizens could not rationally adjust their behavior, because many of them would have no reason to know that they were spreading the virus: “They unwittingly threatened others and could not possibly—barring regular universal testing—know better.” Authorities, especially in the West, came to this same glum conclusion late: to really contain the virus probably required a more intense kind of social control.
Behaving selfishly when the stakes are high is a human weakness, not a national one. A full third of the cases in Denmark, and a sixth of those in hard-hit Sweden, were eventually traced to the Alpine ski town of Ischgl, in Austria, where vacationers came together, contracted the virus, and then dispersed across northern Europe. “In Germany,” Baldwin writes, “distance from Ischgl was one of the most consistently predictive factors of local epidemic severity.” Within Ischgl itself, an epicenter turned out to be the crowded Kitzloch club, where the entire waitstaff tested positive for the virus, and where those infected servers blew whistles to part the crowd, spraying the virus particles all over it. “I just remember the whole experience as being very—wet,” one German customer at Kitzloch told the Times. Really, what system of social control could have successfully accounted for shamelessness?
The really disquieting possibility raised by Baldwin’s history is that the central problem faced by many Western countries this past year was not political division, or libertarianism, or even Trump—it was democracy. It is hard not to feel some self-consciousness when reading Baldwin’s account of the Chinese experience of the pandemic. “Chinese authorities shut down the entire country and isolated infected areas,” he writes. Mask-wearing was mandatory, and “all residents reported the state of their health daily, with community workers going door to door to collect data and verify it.” The public-health response didn’t begin immediately (and authorities allowed travel for the Lunar New Year to proceed). But, even so, the details are still striking, one year later. Those with symptoms and those who tested positive were subject to mandatory quarantine, and anyone who fell ill was checked into a shelter hospital, often staged in gymnasiums, to quarantine away from family and avoid infecting them. “Two new 1,000-bed hospitals went up at blinding speed—six and fifteen days, respectively,” Baldwin writes. These details are well known; the scale suggests a coherence of intent that no state in the West achieved. One way that China avoided some of the political traps that ensnared much of the West was that, taking the risks of asymptomatic spread seriously, its scientists developed testing at a remarkable scale. On a single day in May, Baldwin writes, health officials in Wuhan processed 1.47 million tests for the virus; it took New York State twelve weeks, between March and June, to process 1.7 million. But it wasn’t just the tests. At every level, the Chinese appeared to be acting with intent. In Wuhan, government officials purchased food and delivered it to sealed apartment buildings, where residents dropped buckets to the ground to receive it.
But the Chinese experience looks a little less exceptional (or, at least, appears to hinge less on its authoritarian system) when compared with the Asian democracies of South Korea and Taiwan. Baldwin writes, “It is hard not to be impressed, indeed astounded, by the measures Taiwan imposed almost instantly: strict travel bans, minute tracking of arrivals through phone and personal contact, eye-watering fines and punishments for transgression, centralized production of protective equipment at twice the expected demand, with officially set prices to prevent profiteering, and a clamp-down on spreading misleading information.” Democratic South Korea was similarly impressive. Testing booths were set up that could process fifteen thousand tests per day, and contact tracers were given access to “mobile phones and real-time bank and credit card data and CCTV feeds.” South Korea and Taiwan are not authoritarian countries, but they were able to act with equal speed. Why? Baldwin notes that most Western governments have had extraordinary legal authorities during the pandemic, but “South Korea presumed that its citizens would tolerate drastic impositions on individual freedoms if the authorities managed to squash the epidemic.”
This is an expression of trust, from political leaders, in the people they govern—that citizens were capable of setting aside immediate inconvenience for long-term benefit. In the United States, there was little of this kind of trust. A year into the pandemic, elected officials only gently encouraged Americans to stay home for the holidays, even though travel seemed bound to boost cases or deaths, as if in-person Thanksgiving were too precious to give up. The pattern was set as early as March, when many officials were hesitant to close restaurants and schools, despite a spike in death counts. “We can’t let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” President Trump tweeted on March 22nd, as the United States overtook Germany for the fourth-largest COVID-19 caseload. “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life,” Bill de Blasio had said a week earlier. The anti-mask protesters, their voices amplified by conservative politicians and the media, were loud enough that they often drowned out the larger group of Americans prepared to make sacrifices. Much like in South Korea, public-opinion surveys in the United Kingdom and United States consistently showed that a majority of people wanted more restrictions to smother the pandemic, not less.
Baldwin identifies a strain of “authoritarian envy” in some of the praise for the Chinese response; it runs alongside democratic self-consciousness—the worry of some elected leaders that the people are simply too recalcitrant, too set in their ways. Baldwin notes an astonishing statistic: “By the late spring of 2020, a third of the world’s population was effectively in house arrest. That would have been impossible without extensive buy-in from citizens who understood that the alternative was worse.” Many Americans were among them, and their officials made a deeper error than misreading the science—they misread their own people.
This post has been updated to remove an incorrect timeline of coronavirus infections among members of the Skagit Valley Chorale in March, 2020.
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