Trust predicts COVID success
‘World Happiness, Trust, and Deaths Under COVID-19,” a chapter from the World Happiness Report 2021 (http://worldhappiness.report), analyzes social data from the Gallup World Poll, a yearly poll of thousands of people representing most countries in the world, and COVID mortality data. The report describes characteristics associated with national success in managing the spread of COVID-19 and keeping death rates down through 2020, before effective vaccines were available.
In the first year of the pandemic, after COVID was determined to be transmit- ted through aerosolized droplets, scientists and health officials from around the world agreed that the three most effective ways to protect against the spread of the virus were social distancing, masking and coordinated testing.
By the end 2020, 31 countries had COVID death rates of fewer than 1 per 100,000, including many African and Asian countries, and some island countries like New Zealand. At the other end of the spectrum, 12 countries were ravaged by COVID with death rates over 100 per 100,000, including several European countries and the United States (by that time, 345,000 Americans had perished).
According to the authors, seven factors explained two-thirds of the differences between countries in successfully preventing COVID deaths: median age of the population, being an island nation, distance from countries first infected with COVID, experience with SARS in 2003, having a female head of state, level of trust in institutions, and income inequality within a country.
For Americans, the first four of these characteristics were out of our control. But several high-income countries that look like us on the first five predictors fared far better than us in containing COVID deaths. Here’s the difference: countries with high institutional trust and low income inequality, which is strongly correlated with trust in one’s neighbors, were more successful in uniting their citizens in the fight against the pandemic through masking, distancing and testing.
Institutional trust was defined as confidence in the judicial system, confidence in the honesty of elections, confidence in the local police force, perceived corruption in business, and confidence in the national government.
The U.S. was near the bottom third of all countries internationally for institutional trust and worse for income inequality.
In the early days of the pandemic, America’s lack of trust was literally killing us.
Some Americans, including some politicians “leading” us through the pandemic, were hellbent on reopening the economy before community transmission was minimized and tracing measures were in place, assuming there was a necessary trade-off between saving the economy and saving lives. Tragically, the WHR investigators found that no such trade-off was necessary: countries that controlled the spread of COVID and kept their death rates low also achieved better economic outcomes.
In late December 2020, the first COVID vaccines became available in the U.S. and by April 2021, they were available to anyone who wanted them. Many of us thought this would be the game changer that would end our long ordeal. How fortunate we were to be a rich country that could vaccinate all our citizens.
The Biden administration developed a plan to do just that.
Initially, there was a burst in vaccination activity. Over time, however, vaccination resisters dug in their heels. Despite America’s wealth and early lead, we fell to 53rd place in the world for percent of our population vaccinated (58 percent).
The United States now leads the world in COVID deaths with 749,000. We also have the highest death rate, 224.3 per 100,000, among the rich nations, “bettered” only by some South American and eastern European countries.
This is American exceptionalism, just not the kind we’re used to talking about.
With a little more cooperation and trust, we could have had outcomes more like Canada, a moderate-trust country with a vaccination rate of 75 percent and death rate of 76.3 per 100,000, or Norway, a high-trust country with a vaccination rate of 79 percent and death rate of 16.5 per 100,000. These death rates applied to the U.S. population would have saved 494,000 (Canada) or 694,000 (Norway) American lives.
Coincidentally, citizens of these two countries also report greater feelings of personal freedom than U.S. citizens.
Sadly, Americans continue to pay a heavy price for mistrust, conspiracies, obstructionism and anti-scientific thinking.