“In June, just three states reported daily new coronavirus cases higher than 12 per 100,000 people. Today, every state except Hawaii exceeds that threshold. Some of that is due to greater testing capacity, but the climbing toll of hospitalizations and deaths, which have reached record highs nationally in the last month, show this is not merely a “casedemic” of sick people who might have gone undetected earlier in the year, but a rising tide of Covid-19 across the US.
So how did America get here?
The primary answer lies in President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress, who have collectively abdicated the federal government’s role in addressing the outbreak or even acknowledging its severity. From Trump’s borderline denialist messaging on Covid-19 to Congress’s inability to pass more economic relief, the country has been left in a place where states, local governments, and the public have to fend for themselves — and none of them have the resources to deal with the coronavirus on their own.
Trump and his allies have also actively worked to sideline the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, crippling the agency’s ability to provide guidance to states and others that have now been left out on their own.
At the same time, there are serious structural issues that hindered states’ and the public’s ability to act. Experts have long argued that the US’s public health infrastructure is underresourced and ill prepared for a serious crisis, and the pandemic has exposed this many times over: Nearly a year into the pandemic, no state has capacities for testing and contact tracing that most experts would consider adequate.And the lack of economic relief has made it much harder for people to stay home and business owners to close down, faced with the decision of mitigating the coronavirus’s spread or failing to pay their mortgage and other bills.”
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“over time, as fatigue around the pandemic set in, governors became less proactive toward the coronavirus and more reactive — and they increasingly pushed short-term economic interests over public health concerns.
That was clear as the entire country, over the summer and fall, reopened schools, indoor dining, bars, and other risky indoor spaces, even as experts warned that the consequences could be dire. Now we’re seeing the effects.
That includes states led by Democrats and ones led by Republicans”
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“The public has eased up too. The US has generally gotten better at masking, based on public opinion surveys, but has also gotten much worse at social and physical distancing than in the spring. We’ve patronized the restaurants, bars, and other risky indoor areas that have reopened. We’ve gathered with friends and family over Labor Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, even as public health officials and experts have pleaded that we don’t.
As a result, the US is now among the worst performers on Covid-19 in the world. Despite recent surges in Europe and elsewhere — which were largely the result of similar failures — America remains within the top 20 percent for most coronavirus deaths per person among developed nations, with more than twice the death rate as the median developed country. If the US managed the same Covid-19 death rate as Canada, nearly 190,000 Americans would likely be alive today.
While the story behind those numbers lies mostly in what Trump and much of the federal government have wrought, it’s also on the rest of the US. From the president to governors to mayors to the public, America has failed on Covid-19 — and only by learning from those mistakes can we ensure they don’t happen again.”