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Covid-19’s path of destruction has not exempted the pieties about it. People who said it was “just the flu†don’t look wise after nearly 540,000 deaths in the US. But “14 days to flatten the curve†didn’t turn out to be prescient either.
The more partisan the narrative, the worse it has fared. Liberals have spent much of the pandemic fretting about red-state irresponsibility. But the four states with the highest percentage of Covid deaths all vote consistently for Democratic presidential candidates. Florida, though a consistent target of progressive criticism, has a death rate well below the national average. Some conservatives, for their part, predicted that we’d stop hearing about the pandemic as soon as the election was over. Instead, the deadliest weeks came after it, and both politicians and the press kept talking about it.
Our thinking about the American response to Covid has too often followed this kind of partisan script, with former President Donald Trump’s critics calling the US a “failed state†and his fans minimizing his errors. After more than a year with the virus, maybe it’s time to take a more clear-eyed look?
With so many deaths, it would be callous to call the response a success. But the notion that the US has performed distinctively poorly — as Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control, asserts in the Wall Street Journal, implicitly blaming Trump — does not match the evidence, either. Among the world’s rich countries, the US has a middling Covid death rate: better than the UK or Italy, worse than France or Sweden.
The US case fatality rate is lower than any of those countries, and low overall. We seem, that is, to be doing particularly well at treating those people who contract the illness. We are also getting people vaccinated much faster than the European Union. On both those measures, Americans are faring better even than people in Canada, which has had an enviably low death rate.
But there’s another complication in these cross-country comparisons: We don’t really know what causes some countries to suffer more or less than others, even if we assume that all the data is equally trustworthy.
—Bloomberg