If a world leader in science and technology cannot convince its citizenry to wear face masks amid a raging pandemic, that is a problem. Such is the reality that the US faced as a highly transmissible virus ran riot at US Independence Day celebrations.
With the nation setting ever higher one-day records for COVID-19 infections, which topped 50,000 for the first time on Wednesday, public health experts worry that not enough Americans grasp the risks — or worse, view the crisis through a political lens in an election cycle.
“What type of dystopian situation are we in when a face mask is a political statement,” said Cameron Wolfe, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University who specializes in infectious diseases. “We have got to get woken up to the fact that this isn’t going away.”
Illustration: Yusha
A country that is turned out more Nobel laureates than any other, led development of the first polio vaccine and, yes, put a man on the moon is now a COVID-19 superpower.
The US is home to the highest number of cases — almost 2.84 million and counting — and most deaths, at almost 130,000.
The floundering US response has caused a heat blast of criticism directed at US President Donald Trump’s administration.
Yet the pandemic also casts an unflattering light on deeper maladies — politicized science, information bubbles and inequality — decades in the making that have made the country especially vulnerable.
Worldwide, the reopening of major economies in the past few weeks has relied on an honor system. There is a built-in assumption that enough citizens would be well-informed and take precautions — wearing masks, washing hands, practice social distancing — to prevent community spread of the virus.
No country has been perfect, but the US has been off-the-charts bad by any reasonable reading of the data.
While COVID-19 cases have plateaued and sloped downward in industrialized economies in Europe and Asia, the US is still clocking in at record levels of new infections and accounts for 25 percent of global fatalities.
Promising treatments are emerging, yet an effective vaccine is still months away, if not longer.
If the virus is not contained soon, a new surge of infections in Sun Belt states like Florida, Texas, Arizona and California could push up the daily tally to as high as 100,000, US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci told a US Senate hearing on Tuesday.
“What we’re seeing over the last several days is a spike in cases that are well beyond the worst spikes that we’ve seen. That is not good news. We’ve got to get that under control or we risk an even greater outbreak in the United States,” said Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease fighter, in a BBC radio interview on Thursday.
Videos of jam-packed bars and nightclubs from Arizona to Michigan, and political rallies in Oklahoma have alarmed public health experts. Respiratory droplets traveling into the air after a person sneezes, talks or raises their voice are considered a primary transmission route.
Because US lockdowns were less consistently applied than those in Europe, they were also less effective, Fauci told the BBC.
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield renewed his call for masks and social distancing at the US Senate hearing.
The pandemic has been a moving target for states facing different degrees of vulnerability and reopening strategies. This July 4 holiday was more subdued in some places, with beaches closed in Miami, and events like Chicago’s lake-front fireworks display and a Beach Boys concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles canceled.
The US’ moment of ineptitude has placed Trump, whose poll numbers have crumbled in the past few weeks, in serious political peril.
About 72 percent of Americans said the administration was not prepared to deal with COVID-19, according to a CBS News survey released last week.
Nor has there been unified messaging from top science advisers and the US president, who has predicted the virus would vanish without a vaccine and mused about questionable treatments, ranging from the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to bleach.
Ordinary Americans are not laggards when it comes to basic scientific knowledge, with US high-school students scoring above the average of counterparts in other advanced industrial nations, according to the latest Program for International Student Assessment, a survey of academic achievement internationally.
A majority of Americans have confidence in the expertise of US scientists, according to a Pew Research study.
However, party affiliation matters when it comes to science and public policy debates.
About 73 percent of US Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents think scientists should inform science policymaking, while only 43 percent of US Republicans and those leaning toward the party do, the Pew data showed.
The pandemic is far from the first time science has been politicized in the US. Over the years, debates have raged over the veracity of evidence-based claims about the risks from cigarettes, climate change and vaccines.
Last year, the US Congress approved spending for scientific research into gun violence, after a more than two-decade ban on funding for such studies.
There is also the rise of media information bubbles offering contrasting narratives about the pandemic. A peer-reviewed nationwide study in March showed consumers of conservative media were more likely to believe that public health officials were exaggerating the seriousness of the pandemic to undermine Trump and cast doubt on promising treatments.
Social media platforms with billions of users have become super-spreaders of misinformation about the virus’s origins and treatments.
“The bots and the social media forces can be easily leveraged. You see these extraordinary things take off, where people begin to believe what can’t possibly be true,” Science magazine editor-in-chief Holden Thorp said.
The strong emotions stoked by the crisis have added to the pressure on public health officials rushing to contain the outbreak while answering to the local and federal politicians who control their budgets.
By the middle of last month, at least two dozen local or state public health officers had resigned or been fired during the pandemic, a tally by the National Association of County and City Health Officials showed.
The departures often followed disagreements with political leaders, angry protests or outright threats.
The deep divisions are reflected in the disparities in the pandemic’s impact by race and income levels.
The COVID-19 mortality rate for African Americans is about 2.3 times as high as the rate for white or Asian Americans, according to the latest data compiled by APM Research Lab.
The US devotes about 18 percent of its GDP to healthcare, more than any other large country, but spending is overwhelmingly skewed toward medical treatment rather than public health or prevention.
Many households with incomes below US$40,000 per year, which the US Federal Reserve says have been hit the hardest by pandemic-related layoffs and furloughs, have lost their job-based health insurance.
While the US government is covering the costs of COVID-19 tests, and many newly unemployed qualify for subsidized insurance, 27 million Americans were uninsured before the pandemic and now face financial hardship if they become seriously ill or experience long-term problems after recovery.
“This virus exposes weaknesses and inequalities in any system. The US has a system that doesn’t allow the vulnerable or marginalized to fall into an insurance network,” said Annelies Wilder-Smith, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
As Americans gathered for picnics, barbecues and beach-side parties, the destructive force of the pandemic loomed in the background regardless of their opinions.
Yet as the data show to an alarming degree, a divided US is an ideal environment for an opportunistic virus.
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