How we failed to avert tragedy
Before the 300,000-plus deaths, the widespread financial devastation, the isolation from loved ones and the fatigue of a daily disaster with no clear end, there was this: A tickle in a throat in Chicago. A woman’s sudden crash to the floor of her kitchen in the Bay Area. A playwright in Manhattan with three-quarters of a lung left in his chest, sensing doom and fleeing down the coast with his husband.
In an effort to better understand how the virus exploited the country’s strengths and exposed its weaknesses, USA TODAY interviewed biologists and studied scientific genomic analysis, federal reports concerning super-spreading events, county medical examiners’ data from around the country, and statelevel death and infection data.
Reporters used those sources to find and report the stories, many of them previously untold, of Americans in the path of the virus.
What emerges is a portrait of misinformation and confusion leading to a devastating failure to unite against a common threat.
Piecemeal policies offered a dangerously hollow illusion of control and safety. Scientists, intermittently ignored and villainized, were powerless. As citizens protested and rioted in response to racist police tactics, others detected a more subtle form of prejudice in apathy toward a virus that disproportionately sickened Black and brown Americans. Early ignorance about the spread metastasized into partisan conspiracy-mongering and threats, leading to that most American phenomenon: a health official with a bulletproof vest.
The novel coronavirus didn’t start in the United States, but we have made it our own.