Balancing act: Personal freedom versus the public good
As summer dawned and the Fourth of July holiday approached, I learned I won’t be allowed to visit my son and daughter-in-law in New York or my sister and her family in Massachusetts unless I first self-isolate there for two weeks. Tack that onto the driving time and there goes the whole vacation.
You’re out of luck, too, if you’re considering a trip East (Connecticut and New Jersey too) and you’re in one of those 16 states whose residents are also under orders to sequester because they haven’t gotten their COVID-19 numbers under control.
And that’s even if you did everything right: heeded the experts, wore masks, avoided crowds, stayed out of restaurants. If your state’s leadership refused to issue mandates and left those measures voluntary — or lifted restrictions too soon — you’re going to be paying the price.
You’re paying it for all those Americans who refuse to go masked into superstores and can’t stay out of the bars or practice social distancing. For those heady beachgoers showcased in national news reports clucking about their constitutional rights to cluster.
With the most cases of any country in the world, nearly 2.6 million as of this writing, the U.S. is now barred from the 27-member European Union nations that opened up to visitors July 1. NPR reported that new cases in the EU and the U.K. were 82% lower than at the peak on April 9, while the U.S. recently reported more than 32,000 new cases on two days straight.
Why has the world’s richest, most powerful nation been hit the hardest by the pandemic? “All the traditional measures we would normally use to control or eradicate the virus have not worked in the United States in particular, for a variety of reasons,” virologist Dr. Joseph Fair told NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie last week.
To some extent, Americans have always pushed back on new safety regulations. One reader wrote to remind us about seat belt laws passed in the 1960s, child car seats being required in the ’80s and cigarette smoking banned in restaurants and workplaces in the 1990s and early 2000s. All met with initial resistance. But with strong leadership, people came around to see they saved lives.
So I’m not going to put the major blame on a lack of “personal responsibility.” I’m blaming the lack of strong leadership at the top, the kind that makes such a compelling medical case for why curbs are necessary, and an ethical case for why we are all responsible for our brothers and sisters, so we don’t mind making short-term sacrifices.
Instead, we’ve had denial, deflection and deference to industry and ideology. As November’s election approaches, our president has wanted to show his base he won’t cave to the “politically correct” by disrupting anyone’s freedoms.
Donald Trump has mostly been interested in minimizing the seriousness of the scourge.
In January he said he had it totally under control: “It’s one person coming in from China.”
In February he said, “A lot of people think that (COVID) goes away in April, with the heat.”
In March he said he wanted the country open and “just raring to go by Easter.”
In April he announced he was suspending U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, because it had mismanaged the pandemic.
In May he boasted of taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive.
At a campaign rally in June, he said he wanted testing slowed because “you’re going to find more cases,” something an adviser later called tongue-in-cheek. Which would be fine if the president had shown any real concern or commitment.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds at least took it seriously enough to have daily COVID-19 news briefings for a few months. Now those have been cut back, along with restrictions on gatherings, leading infections to rise — especially among young adults in college towns.
The governor announced last week that she would start reporting as “recovered” anyone who had been diagnosed 28 days earlier, unless public health officials were specifically notified the person was still sick. That’s a broad assumption.
But the most disturbing relaxation has been the state’s decision not to require students to wear masks or do social distancing when they return to school in person. Now it’s up to individual school districts to implement safeguards.
Maybe the time around Independence Day is a good time to re-examine the meaning of personal freedom when it bumps up against the greater public good.
Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register