A year after first coronavirus case, America at a crossroads
Happy anniversary, America; it was exactly one year ago today that we enjoyed our final hours B.C. (before coronavirus).
Can you remember? Twas back when masks were for Halloween, holdups and Phantomming the Opera. The term “social distancing” hadn’t yet been invented, even if the enthusiastically spiteful and the hermitage population wished it had. Your house was a lot more like a home and a lot less like a detention center.
The next day, Jan. 21, 2020, one case of coronavirus got detected in the state of Washington. In February, two people died from COVID-19 in Santa Clara County, Calif., neither with a travel history, meaning there was community spread. In March, 3,768 Americans died, and the term “grim milestone” began to pop up in the daily nomenclature.
The Ides of March brought the whiplash of a downshifting culture — sports, Broadway, the looming Olympics — all vaporized or reduced to vapors. The point was to flatten the curve. We failed spectacularly. It took 304 days to reach 12 million cases in the United States. It took 59 days to reach 12 million more. The year ended with more than 77,000 people dead in December alone. The new year began with January on pace for a record 93,000 deaths and America’s total surpassing 400,000. In Los Angeles, someone was dying from COVID19 every six minutes.
In a Trump administration scheduled to end blessedly today, this was called “rounding the curve beautifully,” the infection data called “almost nothing,” and the health professionals trumpeting serious concerns called “truly morons.”
In the rest of America, sometimes referred to as reality, 400,000 was predictably called a grim milestone, a term I’m swearing off because that milestone has been ground to dust from overuse.
Meanwhile, in China, where the virus established itself, one person died on one day last week. One.
It was China’s first death from COVID-19 in eight months. An uptick in cases triggered panic this week, because normal life had essentially resumed there. Plenty of other countries that American exceptionalists look down upon have performed phenomenally better at mitigating coronavirus than the Disunited States — New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, China, Vietnam, to name only a few.
A Bloomberg analysis drawing empirical evidence from five different metrics put America 18th in the response standings. That ranking came with an asterisk explaining that only the Trump administration’s gigantic infusion of hurry-up funding on vaccines (which he ultimately criticized for arriving too late for Election Day) kept us from being 29th.
You’d be tempted to attribute this dreary performance to an advanced level of general dumbassery in this country, but isn’t America often ranked No. 1 in education on a global scale? In the 2020 ratings put together by U.S. News & World Report, it surely is, and yet No. 1 has 20% of the world’s COVID-19 deaths despite being only 4% of its population.
Other countries with well-regarded educational climates have done even worse across the board. The United Kingdom, No. 2 in education, is 28th in COVID19 response. Italy, No. 16 in education, is 40th. France, No. 5 in education, is 45th.
Equally inexplicable is the global vaccine rollout. Scientists have delivered, but bureaucrats have predictably if sometimes unintentionally provided obstacles. Vaccines won’t end this. Only vaccinations can do that.
America is fortunate that on the one-year anniversary of its final virus-free day, a new government is to be in place, a government unhindered by intellectual and moral bankruptcy, a government that is actually interested in governing and in the indispensable disciplines that make it possible — like science.
As has been emphasized throughout countless analyses of the American COVID-19 response, science and many other disciplines within the intelligentsia were either distrusted or flogged with open contempt. The New York Times reported over the weekend that more than 100 state and local health officials have either been fired or resigned since the start of the pandemic.
Donald Trump, whose organizational and business resumes always indicated clearly that he could not manage a hot dog cart, pushed all responsibility onto the governors with fractious and mostly ineffective results.
The president essentially sidelined Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the planet’s top immunologists, instead preferring the rants of Dr. Scott Atlas, which is something like taking transitional government counseling from the My Pillow Guy. Oh wait.
“The single biggest thing that would have made a difference,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in the Times piece, “was the clarity of message from the person at the top.”
But chaos is the Trump brand, not clarity. In his final hours in office, The Donald can head for Florida knowing that most of America finally caught on to his baseline shtick. As president, he thought good people were bad and bad people were good; he thought smart people were dumb and dumb people were smart; he thought things were true because he said or tweeted them, and other things were fake because he didn’t like them.
He made it tragically obvious that you can’t run a country like that, but you can sure make it sick.