There are many compelling reasons to read Ed Wong’s recent account in The Atlantic of the U.S.’s tragically flawed covid response, but I would put at the top of the list the way it speaks to the mass denial and avoidance around the enormous U.S. death toll due to the covid pandemic. Among all the missteps, misdeeds, and delusions that have characterized our covid years, I’ve increasingly found the basic dissonance between the massive death toll and public acquiescence the single most unnerving aspect of the crisis. Where we should have seen citizen outrage, we have see muted resignation; where we should have seen ceaseless government efforts to protect the population, we have seen a stunningly high tolerance for preventable deaths.
As Wong reminds us, with nearly a million dead, the U.S. faired worse than its peer countries, so much so that:
Dying from COVID robbed each American of about a decade of life on average. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years—the largest such decline in almost a century.” [. . . ] Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent. An estimated 149,000 children have lost a parent or caregiver.
Wong gets to the heart of the matter, exploring why the United States essentially normalized such high death rates, particularly in light of the fact that we have had the means to greatly reduce those numbers. The answers he provides are complex and interrelated, from the basic invisibility of the virus (as compared to telegenic disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes); a fatalism due to repeated government failures to control the virus; far higher death tolls among minority Americans considered less valuable by their fellow citizens; enormous health care disparities based on race and class; and a tendency to make the fight against the virus into a matter of personal rather than collective responsibility.
Crucially, Wong turns to how the attitudes that have undermined the U.S. efforts so far are now setting us up for future disaster and unnecessary loss of life. This may be the greatest cause of the dissonance I’ve been feeling — this enormous public and governmental urge to return to normal, without taking into account the lessons that could help us actually stay in normal if and when we get there. The solutions are far broader than covid-specific measures like vaccines — Wong correctly suggests, among other things, that systemic changes to address inequality in public health more broadly will be needed if we want to avoid a repeat:
The inequities that were overlooked in this pandemic will ignite the next one—but they don’t have to. Improving ventilation in workplaces, schools, and other public buildings would prevent deaths from COVID and other airborne viruses, including flu. Paid sick leave would allow workers to protect their colleagues without risking their livelihood. Equitable access to antivirals and other treatments could help immunocompromised people who can’t be protected through vaccination. Universal health care would help the poorest people, who still bear the greatest risk of infection. A universe of options lies between the caricatured extremes of lockdowns and inaction, and will save lives when new variants or viruses inevitably arise.
The good news is that, according to polling, most Americans do prefer an approach that better prepares the country for future pandemics — what Wong describes as a “build back better” approach. Perversely, though, most people also seem to believe that other people don’t support this, leading to a sense of public resignation; as Wong writes, “By wrongly assuming that everyone else wants to return to the previous status quo, we foreclose the possibility of creating something better.” This is where Wong’s account intersects with what I’ve focused on for the past two years as a core aspect of the failed coronavirus response: the fact that one political party dedicated itself to denying the reality and severity of the pandemic, while the other party shied away from the necessary battles that would have ensured a far more equitable and comprehensive fight against the virus. The American citizenry is being told by its government — by public health authorities responsive to politicians’ overriding interest in promoting a sense of normalcy, and by politicians themselves — that the most important thing is to move on from the pandemic.
Far from an act of leadership, this is an act of profound negligence. Where are the calls for universal health care? Where is the legislation to ensure paid sick leave for service workers who suffered so greatly over the past two years? Such measures are treated as secondary, and at any rate are extreme long shots given the Democrats’ tenuous control of Congress and the GOP’s reflexive opposition to legislation to address health care disparities or workers’ rights. But the situation is obviously perverse: by refusing to prioritize a reckoning with the U.S. coronavirus response, Democrats in particular are failing to catalyze a public discussion that would actually create more pressure and momentum for such legislation to pass.
Instead, at least so far, the government response is heading in the opposite direction, with Congress failing to pass an additional $15 billion in coronavirus-related funding earlier this month — a failure that will have imminent, real-world affects on our ability to manage a pandemic that, as Wong hammers home in a more recent piece, we are still in the midst of. It is also notable that the failure appears due to a combination of Republican indifference to the pandemic and Democratic unwillingness to prioritize the continuing covid fight. This is a de facto consensus to “move on” carried to an absurd extreme — willing it to be so, even as too many Americans continue to die and vaccination rates remain stalled out at too-low levels. If for no other reason, the refusal to look squarely at the failures of the covid response to date must be rectified, for the sake of averting future, avoidable disasters.