Consider This from NPR - America Relied On 'Individual Decisions' To Slow The Virus. It Didn't Work

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

It can feel a bit like headline deja vu: New cases on the rise; bars and restaurants closing back down. More than 130,000 people have died in the United States. Hotspots cropping up across the country.How — after four months — are we here? We examine the emphasis on individual decision making, and science journalist Ed Yong explains how individual actions led to a "patchwork pandemic." Find and support your local public radio station.Email us at [e-mail]. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Kids are losing precious development time being kept at home. And there is evidence they get sick and transmit the virus less frequently than others. For those reasons, the American Academy of Pediatrics said this week, the goal for fall should be students physically present in school. So, you know, it does require a little bit of the society coming together and decide what's important. Andy Slavitt, who served as director of the Medicare and Medicaid programs under President Obama, said here's another reason to reopen schools. You can't open the economy unless kids have somewhere to be while their parents are at work. So, he says, maybe we should focus less on opening bars and restaurants and more on getting cases under control.

Is it more important for us to wear masks or is it more important for us to send our kids to school? Is it more important to go to bars or is it more important to try to get the economy slowly moving again? That's going to be a really important set of decisions we're going to face in the next weeks, if not immediately. Coming up about those decisions and how we are all making them, this is Consider This from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Friday, July 3rd. A lot of people will be celebrating

Fourth of July this weekend. But for many people, it'll be tough. This country, far and away, leads the world in coronavirus cases and in the number of people who have died. Nearly 130,000 people. The next closest country is Brazil, where more than 60,000 people have died. So, how did we get here? Okay, thank you very much, everybody. And I want to start by saying that our hearts go out to the people of New York as they bear the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic

in America. Exactly three months ago, on April 3rd, the CDC first recommended we all wear masks. The CDC is advising the use of non-medical cloth face covering as an additional voluntary public health measure. So it's voluntary. You don't have to do it. They suggest it for a period of time. Just so you know, the president used that word voluntary six times. This is voluntary. It's only a recommendation. It's voluntary. Really a voluntary thing. You can do it.

You don't have to do it. I'm choosing not to do it. They're not mandatory guidelines. They're guidelines. They suggest you could wear them. You don't have to wear them. It's a voluntary thing. You could wear one or not wear one.

Your choice. I don't think I'm going to be doing it, but you have a lot of ways you can look at it. Americans value individual freedom. They can make their own decisions. Just give them the information and trust them to do the right thing. It's really important that the governors and mayors communicate critical information to their communities. Dr. Deborah Birx at the White House on April 21st, just as Georgia was reopening, said people around the country could look at the data

and understand the risks. I believe people in Atlanta would understand that if their cases are not going down, that they need to continue to do everything that we said, social distancing, washing your hands, wearing a mask in public. To be fair, the risks are different depending on where you are. There are different communities in different places. Just trust people, said the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, last week. We're going to continue to put out the messaging. We're going to continue to put out the guidance. And we're going to trust people to make good decisions.

Three months into this pandemic, though, and we can see those decisions in the numbers. The highest one-day surge in COVID-19 cases Florida has seen since the start. The Arizona Department of Health Services' own state hospital is struggling to contain a growing outbreak of COVID-19. Yet another record day of COVID-19 cases in Dallas. Coronavirus infections in L.A. County have now surpassed 100,000 cases. L.A. County reported more than 2900 cases. Now, some of those places seeing the biggest surges have pulled back on the idea of letting individual people make decisions.

Bars and restaurants have closed again. Mayors and even some governors have instituted mask requirements. So Jake, it's not really about reopening. We can and we have to get back to work, back to school, and back to health care. And after months of encouraging people to make individual decisions, administration officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar say some individuals are not making the right decisions. Here's what he said about reopenings in states that are seeing surges. That's not so much about what the law says on the reopening as what our behaviors are within that. And if we act irresponsibly, if we don't

social distance, if we don't use face coverings in settings where we can't social distance, if we don't practice appropriate personal hygiene, we're going to see spread of disease. And so this is why you see the local authorities are reimposing certain community mitigation restrictions where they've seen inappropriate individual behavior that's enabled spread. Science journalist Ed Young of The Atlantic has done some of the most comprehensive reporting on the pandemic out there. My colleague Sarah McCammon asked Ed the same question we started with. How did we get here? Here's their conversation.

There's going to be many factors, but I think the most important one at this point has to be the utter lack of leadership from the Trump administration. To control a pandemic like this in a country as large and decentralized in its healthcare as the United States requires a solid coordinated federal hand. And that just has not happened. The administration has floundered. It has left things up to the states. So of course, you have what I've written about before as a patchwork pandemic, where the virus has been under control in some places where it was where it originally hit very hard, but is now taking off in a lot of places in the Sunbelt and the Heartland that were previously untouched. Ed, you talk about this lack of political leadership as a major driver of this increase in cases we're seeing. How much, though, is related to pandemic fatigue? I mean, it is hard to be constantly vigilant

and it is hard to stay home for a lot of people. What role does that play? So it's very difficult to tear those two things apart because they're very much related. This idea that lockdowns, that these stay-at-home orders were just going to protect us in their own right, that was never the intention. The intention was that people would buy the country valuable time to ramp up testing,

to ramp up contact tracing, to get our act in gear and mount the extraordinary effort needed to contain this virus. That was the implicit social contract. And for that time, people, all of us, made extreme sacrifices to our emotional and mental health, to our livelihoods, to our contact with our families and loved ones. And that time, I'm sad to say, was largely squandered by this federal inaction. Yes, it's not quite as bad as it was in March, because we do have more resources in play, but it's really not that much better. You talk about sort of social compacts we make to sort of help each other out and try to

reduce the spread of the virus. That's hard to do in an environment like this. You know, a lot was made of the idea of coming together early in the pandemic and doing the right thing for the collective good. But we are not united in how we are dealing with this pandemic right now. How much more difficult does it make this challenge of trying to beat this thing? So I'll give you a positive take on this, which is that despite everything, despite the rampant misinformation circulating around the pandemic, including from the White House itself, most Americans really did do the right thing. People were incredibly willing to act for the collective good and stay at home for a long period of time.

And even now, after states reopened, there was still majority support for social distancing, majority support for mask wearing across the political spectrum. Now, yes, we are fraying a little bit. Yes, we are divided because this is a highly polarized nation. But this idea that people are fractured only partly captures the picture. There is more unity. And if only we actually had leadership in place that could capitalize that, that could unify the nation further, America would stand a chance. The reason why it is failing out of all proportion to its stature in the world and completely

differently to what other countries are doing is because it has forces acting against the unity of its people. And those include people who are supposed to lead the country. I hear a lot of concern from you about our political leadership. At the same time, I hear, I think, some optimism from you about the number of Americans that do want to solve this and do want to do their part. Do you see a way forward here? And if so, what is it? To be honest, at the moment, I'm not hopeful. I think that the problem is that the country is not psychologically primed for a persistent disaster like this. COVID was never going to be like a

hurricane. It wasn't going to hit us and then leave, leaving a safe period in which we could begin the process of recovery. The virus, like we said many months ago, was going to be here for some time. Can we beat that without coordinated leadership? I'm not sure we can. I'm really not sure. I think people are trying their best. I think individual Americans are trying their best. I think business leaders, many governors and mayors are trying their absolute best, but fragmented and disjointed in the way that we are. I think we're looking at a very, very difficult summer ahead. Ed Yong of The Atlantic talking to Sarah McCammon on All Things Considered.

And just so you know, you're going to be hearing a lot more from our colleagues from that show on this show. Elsa Chang, Adi Cornish, Mary Louise Kelly and Ari Shapiro. This show is produced by Emily Alfin Johnson, Gabriela Saldivia, Anne Lee, Lee Hale and Brent Bachman and edited by Beth Donovan. Write to us at considerthisatnpr.org. Have a safe Fourth of July weekend. We'll be back next week. I'm Kelly McEvers. Comedian Nicole Byer doesn't consider herself body positive.

She just accepts herself as is. I hate that there's a name for like not hating a part of who you are. Do you know what I'm saying? Like it's insane. Nicole Byer on her new book Very Fat Very Brave and How to Love Yourself listen to It's Been a Minute from NPR