The COVID-19 era has been a time of extraordinary challenges, and it has been encouraging to see how remarkably well Americans have dealt with those challenges.
There is much room for criticism and for improvement, but there is also much to admire: the rapid development and deployment of vaccines took far less time in the United States than in most of Europe, not to mention the generally well-governed countries of Australia and New Zealand, which still lag with vaccination rates that are one-half and one-third of the U.S. rate, respectively; the economic constriction caused pain and upheaval that should not be minimized, but it is something close to a miracle that the U.S. economy suffered only a 3.5 percent contraction in 2020 with retail sharply curtailed and travel and hospitality effectively suspended; we conducted a national election under the pressure of the epidemic, and our constitutional processes withstood Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert them; there was a period of stress for the health-care system, but the hospitals were not overrun; critical services continued to function and the supply chain held up even if toilet-paper shoppers found themselves in Venezuela for a couple of weeks; we got a good look at what works, from Amazon and FedEx to university-based scientific research and — call me a heretic — the Federal Reserve.
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