In a recent article, Ed Yong of The Atlantic asked why, as we approach one million Covid deaths, the United States seems unable to reckon with the toll the disease has taken. As he notes, the cost of the pandemic has been — and continues to be — brutal. He explains that the U.S.
reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic.
And yet we seem eager to pretend that everything is fine. It’s over now, we’re told, let’s transition back to normal as if nothing ever happened. And don’t think too much about the staggering toll of the disease.
Yong discusses several reasons why we have become anesthetized to the cost of COVID-19, but one particularly struck me. He writes that
pundits who got vaccinated against COVID quickly started arguing against overcaution [sic] and (inaccurately) predicting the pandemic’s imminent end. The government did too, framing the crisis as solely a matter of personal choice, even as it failed to make rapid tests, high-quality masks, antibody cocktails, and vaccines accessible to the poorest groups.
The CDC’s latest guidelines continue that trend, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has argued. Globally, the richer north is moving on while the poorer south is still vulnerable and significantly unvaccinated. All of this “shifts the burden to the very groups experiencing mass deaths to protect themselves, while absolving leaders from creating the conditions that would make those groups safe,” Courtney Boen, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me.
This seems to me a particularly American thing to do, and we do it all the time, not just with COVID-19. Our pandemic response devolved pretty quickly from “we’re all in this together” to “sorry, pal, you’re on your own.” Especially once vaccines became widely available, there was little appetite in America for collective action to prevent the spread of the disease, even though the country has a number of people who are immunocompromised or were under an age where they could be vaccinated.
Our personal responses to COVID-19 were judged according to the standards of our local politics — in some parts of the country, being cautious meant you were “living in fear;” in other areas, catching COVID-19 meant you were judged for not being cautious enough.
Many of us felt a personal responsibility to protect ourselves and our families and communities, but the incentives facing us didn’t change much to help us with that. Government agencies like the CDC gave confusing, hard-to-follow advice. People were encouraged to stop the spread while still being asked to come to work.
We were asked to mask up without being told which kinds of masks actually work (even people who understood that they should wear KN95 masks had to wade through zillions of counterfeit masks on Amazon and at stores, with no real guidance on how to choose).
Even leaders like business owners and school principals were largely on their own in determining how best to operate safely. In the name of freedom, each of us had to become an amateur epidemiologist, and it was on you if you messed it up.
What would have been different had Americans thought about COVID-19 in collective terms? Maybe we could have framed it like this: “a deeply unfortunate fate has befallen us. It’s nobody’s fault that this happened, and it’s not your fault if you get sick. Let’s all do our best to keep everyone, even those most vulnerable, as safe as possible.”
We’re such an atomized society that we turn lots of problems that are really communal into each individual’s responsibility — even when the problem isn’t really the individual’s fault and its costs may be too great for most of us to bear alone.
We definitely do this with climate change. Climate issues are often, and in some cases understandably, framed in the language of personal responsibility. Do you care about the environment? Then you’ll buy an EV, stop flying, and put solar panels on your house. If you just make the correct consumer choices, you will be a virtuous citizen.
There are two problems with this. First, our society is set up to make the “right” choices more difficult. Living an environmentally virtuous life is a luxury that not everyone can afford — and it’s denigrated as such by right-wingers who attack Tesla-driving, vegetarian liberals.
Second, the corporate world is ecstatic when we frame climate problems as a matter of individual responsibility. Do you ever lie awake at night feeling guilty about your carbon footprint? Thank BP, which devised the concept a few decades ago to make climate change seem like an issue that came down entirely to your personal choices.
This trend goes back to the beginning of modern environmentalism, when the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged Americans to stop littering. It was, of course, a lovely thing to encourage, but Keep America Beautiful was funded by companies like Coca Cola and the American Can Co. — i.e., the very entities that were producing all of the trash that lined America’s roads. By making “littering” the problem — as opposed to the mass production of billions of disposable bottles and cans with no easy mechanism for recycling them — Keep America Beautiful made the environment your problem, not our problem.
