Why the US took an early 'lead' in the pandemic
Sadly, viruses don't care for how laws are written
Note: This was written in early April of 2020, when the cases in the US overtook all other countries to become #1 in the world.
The pandemic was, sadly, a perfect storm to affect the US. Let me lay out how:
The US, as a society, is a lot more individualistic than other countries. This makes support for collective action harder to obtain[1].
The US, as a society, has historically low levels of belief in the federal government. Shutting down the country may be an epidemiological solution, but its implementation is a political problem. Political pressures are different around the country: strong trust in the federal government, and a central agency taking decisive action, could be golden in a country with 50 states, 50 different levels of understanding of the crisis, and 50 different political wills.
The American media landscape is sharply fractured. Beliefs in different media sources are almost mirror images of each other: not only do Democrats not trust Republicans’ news sources, they actively distrust them, and vice versa. In the absence of trust in the federal government, and in the absence of strong central messaging (something that is really not a strength of the current administration), any differences in coverage are amplified if there are no sources of information everyone trusts.
(Your Small Ray of Hope for Today (TM): Nobody trusts BuzzFeed.)
This, combined with several other factors[2], results in something incredible: opinion about a pandemic affecting millions around the globe is divided along partisan lines.
Lastly, and most importantly, even if the federal government wanted to take action, the state model of the US uniquely handicaps it[3]in the events of nationwide disasters like this.
It might be the way the US’ laws are written, but sadly, the virus doesn’t give a fuck. The truth is, leaving action in cases like this to the state or local level creates discrepancies[4] in the level of action. That’s not good - at all.
Let me explain this point properly, because it has huge consequences.
As of March 30th, 2020, this is the spread of reported Coronavirus cases[5] in the US:
(Source linked as footnote)
A reminder, at this point, that detection of cases is often delayed by about two weeks, and that testing has only now being ramped up and is still catching up.
Here is the current state of lockdowns or stay-at-home orders[6], as of March 30th, 2020:
(Source: New York Times)
And this is a completely expected consequence of leaving action on a pandemic to the state or local level. Local politics is, by nature, shortsighted in both space and time. It has to be. Central authority is needed for this exact purpose, to see far-reaching consequences and direct states to follow suit, especially so that a moving, all-encompassing disaster like this one doesn’t become a slow-motion train wreck.
Let’s take an example. Florida reported its first Coronavirus case on March 1. As of today, Coronavirus cases are almost all over the state.
Here’s a map of the spread across Florida:
(Source: Florida Department of Health Dashboard[7])
As of March 31st, after 5,074 cases, the governor has put out shelter-in-place orders in exactly the four hardest-hit counties - Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Monroe. (These are the four deep blue counties to the extreme South tip of Florida in the map above.)
In the middle of the best season for business in Florida, I imagine that there's immense pressure on him to not take that action. I don't envy him those decisions at all.
And that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be up to him.
If you follow along with what has been about three weeks of the pandemic in the US (the site linked lets you move a slider and see how the cases have grown in different parts of the country), you can see the problem with this approach. Cases often jump from city to city, like seeds being carried on the wind, sprout there, and spring offshoots all around themselves, until the whole of the US looks like a field of red flowers in bloom.
The current patchwork is not a good approach for this problem, because it’s relying on the foresight of every community to take action at once on a problem that may be far away from it, that grows exponentially instead of linearly, and that necessitates immediate discomfort and economic cost, for preventing a future problem that may or may not arrive. Humans can sometimes be arsed to move out of the way when there is a hurricane coming right their way, right now. This particular combination of factors is simply not something we’re naturally geared to tackle (something that arguably hampers our response to problems like global warming).
What you’re seeing in different places, where restrictions are put in place in a county, and only in the county, after cases are found there - is exactly the natural human response. (Not even that, sometimes- hi Alabama!) The incubation period of this virus means that, if you’re playing catch-up after cases like this, you’re about two weeks behind the ball.
Here’s the thing: In an epidemic, a society is only as strong as its weakest link. In a country of the scale at which the US is, which is one huge chain, it is all the more important to protect the weakest links through centralised action, and the US’ patchwork response is not enough. What you’re seeing is, sadly, not unexpected.
TL;DR: As a society, as a political system, and as a country, the US is not naturally well positioned to deal with this crisis. Its current administration is not well equipped to overcome this natural disadvantage. The current situation is a sad result of that.
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Footnotes
[1]https://eml.berkeley.edu/~groland/pubs/IEA%20papervf.pdf
[2]Israel Ramirez's post in Left Brain
[3]Why There’s No National Lockdown
[4]Lockdowns, closures: How is each US state handling coronavirus?
[5]CORONAVIRUS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW - National Governors Association
[6]See Which States and Cities Have Told Residents to Stay at Home