The view that the United States has uniquely failed in the pandemic is starting to look rickety.
Very few countries have fared well, and policies and results have been ever-shifting and hard to evaluate in the short term.
‘S ex banned indoors for Tier 2 couples living apart, No 10 confirms.” That was the headline from the London Evening Standard that went skittering across my digital screen. It is possibly the ugliest sentence I’ve ever read in the English language. “Tier 2,” which designates a section of COVID-era London, not an actual neighborhood, gives it an Orwellian mouthfeel. “No 10 confirms” gives the impression that the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Boris Johnson (who used to be fun), somberly nodded at the ban. But then you read it again and realize the implication: Sex is not banned outdoors. Perhaps it’s encouraged.
Anyway, that’s how the pandemic is going in the United Kingdom. I’m suddenly glad I live in the United States during this pandemic.
The view that the United States has uniquely failed in the pandemic is starting to look rickety. Final grades are being postponed. The number of contrasting “success stories” is shrinking. Cross the English Channel from the sexless Tier 2 Londoners and it’s also not great. Last week, Hungary and Germany hit new highs in daily COVID cases. Slovakia is climbing up the charts. France and the Czech Republic are hitting new highs. Ireland’s health experts advised returning the country to its strictest lockdown. CNN reported Saturday that “the daily death toll on the continent could reach five times its April peak within months.” Meanwhile, the U.S. is testing more than Europe is, not only on a per capita basis but also overall.
And as these numbers roll in, the speculative theories about how the pandemic spreads are falling apart. Why was it so mild in Central Europe? At one point, people theorized that certain Central European nations were spared because of some immunity conveyed by the overland trading routes of the Middle Ages. The idea that the populist authoritarians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán were better served by their psychological disposition to foreign threats may also be failing.
There’s also the strange way that the media and scientific communities seem to polarize politically rather than scientifically. In the United States, the conservative Donald Trump has been a mask-and-lockdown skeptic. The mainstream media and their favored scientists contradict him at every turn. In Israel, the conservative Bibi Netanyahu is a lockdown proponent. Scientists and much of the media there are polarizing against him, advocating a strategy of protecting the vulnerable and saving the mental health and livelihoods of the many. Prime Minister Johnson’s lockdown tendencies in the U.K. have received a rebuke, and the Great Barrington Declaration, which some scientists and medical professionals have signed to convey their criticism of the lockdowns, is getting big press there and elsewhere in the world. In Ireland, a government that was socially progressive got good press in February when it brushed off travel bans and border restrictions as nonsense, and it got great press in May when it took the opposite tack of locking down the whole country. We saw the same thing at the beginning of the pandemic when some of the first voices warning of danger ahead and counseling people to buy masks were seen as conservative, while liberal media outlets downplayed the danger and made fun of the people who were concerned.
The few remaining success stories look like stories about hard borders. New Zealand had an effective seven-week stay-at home-order to stop the spread. It instituted a strict quarantine on travelers coming in. South Korea is almost an island too, because its one land border with North Korea is the hardest border on earth. It used a dramatic lockdown in Seoul. Then it instituted a form of digital testing and tracing and centralized quarantine that eliminated privacy for the sick.
So what is left? It’s true that Donald Trump has bumbled through the crisis. He has said false but reassuring things to the public, in an attempt to save the economy and the electoral hopes he attached to its performance. Polls suggest that he is very likely to lose a winnable reelection because the public perceived his statements on the coronavirus as dishonest and distracted, and because his own attempts to protect the White House failed — notwithstanding that three members of the Biden campaign recently tested positive for COVID, even though the campaign has practically made a fetish of mask-wearing and social distancing.
But beyond the failures of Trump, it will be hard to judge our national efforts until this pandemic is over. It was Americans who locked themselves down before the orders came in to do so. And it was Americans who began returning to a partially unrestricted life even before many health regulations were lifted. The efforts of our own pharmaceutical labs look promising, but we are probably months away from knowing the results.
And we may never quite understand the variables at work in a nation’s total COVID response, particularly those that are cultural and political in nature. What the Chinese or South Koreans will tolerate in the name of public health may be more than European or American cultures will accept. Even as cases rise to unprecedented levels in Europe, so too does public dissatisfaction with the containment measures. Even forthcoming vaccines may not end the pandemic the way we hope. As fatality rates from COVID plummet, the desire to take a vaccine has plummeted as well.
The only approach during the whole pandemic that still makes sense is “bending the curve.” Originally, this was about preventing the kind of hospital overwhelm that causes an enormous spike in the fatality rate. Even now, on a gentler slope, it makes sense to delay infections as the treatments improve.
And as a judgement, still provisional, it now seems relatively clear that authorities in the West have tended to delay imposing costs on the elite and on the elite’s favored ideologies, only to impose harsh costs on the working poor, the provincial and rural, and especially on children. The position of international health organizations in favor of open borders and against travel restrictions (even restrictions placed on China), turned out to be entirely ideological, not scientific. But in fact, much of that international business travel was replaced by Zoom meetings. The incomes of wage workers and local entrepreneurs were not so easily substituted.
In the meantime, elections mean that leaders are getting grades from their peoples. Whatever you make of its natural advantages of low density, small population, and easy-to-quarantine status as an island, New Zealand’s Labour government was reelected with an overwhelming majority after claiming victory over COVID-19. Boris Johnson must be happy that he probably has years before facing an election in the United Kingdom. Donald Trump is being graded right now.