Coronavirus reveals a lack of ‘cultural humility’ in US

Failure to follow other countries a major misstep

In 1910, when a contagious pneumonic plague was ravaging northeastern China, a physician there concluded that the disease traveled through the air. So he adapted something he had seen in England. He began instructing doctors, nurses, patients and members of the public to wear gauze masks.

That pioneering by Dr. Wu Lien-teh, a Cambridgeeducated modernizer of Chinese medicine, is credited with saving the lives of those around him. A French physician working with Wu, however, rejected putting on a mask. He died within days.

More than a century later, now that the new coronavirus has spread across the United States and claimed more than 18,000 lives, some scholars and health system experts are shaking their heads that lessons from other countries were not learned in time to help Americans reduce the toll of the pandemic within their borders.

“No matter how long I live, I don’t think I will ever get over how the U.S., with all its wealth and technological capability and academic prowess, sleepwalked into the disaster that is unfolding,” says Kai Kupferschmidt, a German science writer.

His comment last month came as the United States neared 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, and faced a critical lack of ventilators, masks and testing. To date, the U.S. has more than 500,000 cases. The Trump administration says its approach has been effective and has blamed others for any missteps.

South Korea, a country that had its first reported case of the illness at about the same time as the U.S., has had a much lower trajectory of the disease and deaths. The United States, however, has become the global epicenter.

Of course, the United States is a larger, more complex, more heterogeneous country than South Korea, Taiwan or Singapore, the three countries in Asia that seem so far to have managed the pandemic with better results. But when they were reacting quickly to the disease, the United States was acting as if the huge disruptions of life that had happened there would not happen here.

Should U.S. political leaders and the public have taken cues from other countries victimized by the disease much earlier — including China itself, which, after an initial period of secrecy and confusion, took rapid and draconian measures to slow the virus’s spread?

To some experts, the reluctance of the United States to imitate other countries’ successful behavior reveals a reluctance to learn from other countries, believing that whatever needs doing can be done best following America’s own precepts.

“It’s as if these events are happening in a vacuum and Americans think none of these events outside our borders are relevant to them,” says Dr. Mical Raz, a physician and health policy expert at the University of Rochester in New York. “When people were dying in China, it was hard for journalists to get anyone to pay attention. But what is happening here now is very similar to what happened in Wuhan.”

Even in an age of globalization, the slowness of nations to take on board the lessons of others could help to explain why so few in the United States started preparing for the disease outbreak after it blew up in January with lockdowns in China and several Asian countries.

Kupferschmidt, who studied as a molecular biologist, said when German scientists developed a test for the virus in January and gave it to the World Health Organization, which offered it around the world, that was an opportunity for other countries to get a quick start on aggressive testing. He wonders why the United States did not follow suit.

Officials at the CDC decided to develop their own test instead. That effort — delayed and, some say, bungled — cost the United States at least a month of testing.

“So many missed opportunities,” Kupferschmidt said.

He sees a pattern with other global problems. “A lot of my colleagues who cover climate say, ‘Welcome to the club.’ Unless it impacts you personally, people just don’t see it.”

The United States might benefit from practicing “cultural humility,” says Daryl Van Tongeren, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan’s Hope College. “Cultural humility is this idea that we realize that our way is only one way of seeing the world, and we demonstrate curiosity to learn from others.”

In his view, “True innovation comes from being open-minded. Countries that become insular are the ones that fail to advance.”