America had every advantage fighting COVID — and blew it
Do you even know what 250,000 people looks like? Because I don’t. I have been trying to imagine it, and failing.
The closest I can get is imagining something I have seen: Yankee Stadium, filled to capacity with a World Series crowd — multiplied by five. Then comes the hard part: I imagine all of them locked into the stadium and dying, mostly alone and terrified, of heart attacks or strokes or kidney failure or slow suffocation, while their families wait weeping in the parking lot.
And then I imagine that happening on a livestream so the country can witness the horror. That’s what it would look like if you could see all the Americans who have died of COVID-19 since March.
I can tell myself that everyone dies, which is unhelpful. I can tell myself that the great majority of the victims are old and many would have died of something else relatively soon — but then again, many wouldn’t, and I don’t think of the last decade or so of life as a sort of useless appendix.
More usefully, I can tell myself there was probably never a window when we could have completely controlled this virus. By the time we knew it was a problem, it was already here, silently circulating. I can look at the death rates in places such as Italy and console myself that it could have been worse.
But that’s not much consolation, because we should have done so much better.
In the spring, the United States was uniquely well-positioned to fight this virus. Americans generally demand more personal space than people in other countries; we stand farther apart, our houses are bigger, and our public spaces tend to be larger and better ventilated. We drive rather than take mass transit. We are richer and can afford to spend more on virus-proofing our homes and businesses — or paying for the ones that can’t be virus-proofed to be closed until the pandemic ended. We have more intensive care beds per capita, more equipment and more specialists than almost anywhere else. We have a fantastically innovative biotech sector.
Two major American assets are weather and time. America’s weather was more favorable to fighting COVID-19 because more of our landmass falls in southern latitudes where it’s comfortable, for most of the year, to spend time outside. Moreover, we had time to figure all that out, because Europe got hit hard first, giving us a valuable preview of horrors to come. That bought us priceless extra days — only we squandered them and every other advantage we started with.
Sure, America doesn’t have the absolute worst death rate in the industrialized world — not yet, anyway. I’m not sure we’ll be able to say that after Americans leap from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Either way, we’ll still be doing much worse than we could have — and much worse than we should have. And I mean all of us, not just President Donald Trump.
Yes, Trump was by far the worst bungler in this whole affair.
But there is plenty of blame to go around: the public health folks who told us not to wear masks; the politicians who didn’t pass enough stimulus; the skeptics who refused to revise their skepticism when new evidence emerged; the refuseniks who treated their own noncompliance as proof that distancing measures can’t work; anyone who treated a forecasting model as a proven fact; everyone who blessed some gatherings while condemning others; the Republicans who humored Trump; the teacher unions and governments that pushed unnecessary, damaging school closures; everyone, left or right, who turned this into a political battle with their fellow Americans rather than a desperate fight our country needed to unite to win.
I include myself in that number. I think of all the times I lost my temper with COVID skeptics, even though I knew it was counterproductive, and I regret every one of them. I wonder if I should have advocated for less intrusive policies that might have garnered broader support, or if I would have convinced more people if I’d evinced a little more humility in my conviction that America needed to take radical action immediately. I’ll never know, of course, but I’ll always wonder: How many people could we have saved if everyone, from the president on down, had acted as if saving American lives from a deadly virus was the most important thing we had to do this year? How many stadium seats could we have filled with the people who didn’t have to die?