The EconomistJune 27th 2020 United States 191O
n june 21stthe World Health Organisa-
tion announced a record increase in
coronavirus cases round the world: 183,
new cases during the previous 24 hours,
more than at the height of the pandemic in
April. A fifth were in the United States,
which faced—as Anthony Fauci, an infec-
tious-disease expert, told Congress—a
“disturbing surge” in infections.
Five days before, Mike Pence, the vice-
president, wrote an article in the Wall Street
Journalpouring scorn on “alarm bells over
a ‘second wave’ of coronavirus infections”.
Pointing to falling numbers of deaths, he
claimed that “panic is overblown...we are
winning the fight against the coronavirus”.
President Donald Trump later told Fox
News the virus would just “fade away”.
Such contradictory claims are more
than playing with numbers. They reveal a
changing pattern of infection which is not
only confusing but, in the final analysis,
worrying for the future of the pandemic.
America’s death toll and caseload are
high, and not only in absolute terms. Per
head, it has had twice as many cases as Eu-
rope and about 50% more deaths. The
number of new cases rose 42% in the two
weeks to June 21st, and this national aver-
age disguises a more disturbing trend.
America’s totals have been dominated by
the terrible outbreak in New York City.
Greater New York has accounted for about a
third of all deaths. If you strip out the area,
you find new-case numbers in the rest of
the country barely budged in May, rose in
June and are now as high as they were at the
height of the pandemic (see chart). Outside
New York, America has failed to halt the
growth of the coronavirus.
The pandemic has spread as it has
grown. On June 24th infections were rising
in 27 states. In 18, new cases were at record
levels. In the early days, the epidemic was
concentrated in the north-east. Now it is
moving to the sunbelt. Ten of the states
where numbers are rising fastest are in the
West; they are also rising in all but one of
the states of the Confederacy, as well as one
confederate territory (Arizona).
This is changing who gets the disease,
as well as where. The epidemic began as an
infection of inner cities, minorities and
Democratic areas. It is now spreading
through suburbia, among whites and in
Republican places. Bill Frey, a demogra-
pher at the Brookings Institution, a think-
tank, has been tracking the course of theinfection by looking at counties which re-
port significant rises in cases (meaning, by
100 or more per 100,000 people). Early in
the disease, at the end of March, 81% of peo-
ple living in such counties were in cities;
48% were white (less than the white share
in the population) and a third had voted for
Mr Trump in 2016. In the two weeks to June
14th, 2% lived in inner cities; 70% were
white and 58% had voted for Mr Trump.
The spread of disease has not (so far)
been accompanied by the disasters that
were widely feared. There has been no rep-
etition of New York state’s catastrophe,
with its almost 400,000 cases; California, a
more populous place, has had less than
half that number. The death toll has fallen
to roughly 500 a day, compared with morethan 2,000 at the peak. There is some evi-
dence that the disease is getting less fatal as
it spreads. In California and Florida, deaths
from covid-19 are running at about 3% of
the number of cases. That is lower than in
New York, where the figure is 8%, and far
below the worst-hit countries in Europe,
where it is 14-18%. (It should be said that
these numbers are notoriously unreliable
because they vary according to the testing
regime; still, the disparity is striking.)
All this shows there have been success-
es in America’s response to the pandemic,
as well as problems. Compared with the
number of cases, its death toll is modest,
perhaps because victims tend to be rela-
tively young. Its hospitals and doctors
seem to be getting better at treating the dis-
ease. Even the Black Lives Matter protests
have not been super-spreader events, per-
haps because (suggests a study by Dhaval
Dave of Bentley University, Massachusetts)
other Americans reacted by not going out,
limiting the spread of infection.
But these successes do not compensate
for the failures. Rather, they leave America
stuck between two poles. New cases are too
low to justify reimposing lockdowns in or-
der to control the virus. But they are too
high to reopen states safely and resume
normal life. It is an unhappy medium. At
best, America is likely to stumble along
with its current levels of infection over the
next few months. At worst, as Dr Fauci told
Congress, America could face a second,
more damaging wave this winter. 7Decoding the confusing messages of
the coronavirus epidemicThe course of covid-Unhappy medium
Up, up, not away
Covid-19, new confirmed cases
Seven-day moving averageSource:JohnsHopkinsUniversityCSSE30,20,10,02020Mar Apr May JunNew York CityUnited States
(excluding New York City)I
n communisttimes, recalls Stoyana Ge-
orgieva, editor-in-chief of the Bulgarian
news website mediapool.bg, her grandfa-
ther would listen in secret to the American-
sponsored shortwave radio stations that
were among the few sources of uncensored
news behind the Iron Curtain: Voice of
America (voa), Radio Free Europe and Ra-
dio Liberty (rfe/rl). When she became a
reporter for rfe/rlherself in the 1990s, “it
wasn’t just a media outlet, it was a cause...a
window to the life that we could have some
day.” Over the past decade, when news me-
dia in much of eastern Europe have been
taken over by governments or oligarchs,
rfe/rlhas again become a crucial source
of independent reporting.
Now the independence of rfe/rlitself
is in question. On June 4th the Senate con-
firmed Michael Pack as the new head of theusAgency for Global Media, the parent orga-
nisation of rfe/rland voa. Mr Pack, a film-
maker and ex-president of the paleo-conser-
vative Claremont Institute, is a close ally of
Steve Bannon, formerly the president’s chief
strategist. On June 15th the director of voare-
signed. Two days later Mr Pack fired the
heads of rfe/rland four other organisa-
tions in his purview: Radio Free Asia, the
Middle East Broadcasting Network, the Of-
fice of Cuba Broadcasting and the Open Tech-
nology Fund, which builds software for se-
cure news gathering. Government inter-
ference in news gathering and editorial
decisions is prohibited by law. But firing the
directors sent a clear signal.
To those who rely on the American news
agencies, it all seemed dismally familiar. In
Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary or Russia, the
sequence is routine. An independent newsWASHINGTON, DC
The White House takes aim at American soft powerState-funded mediaFreedom FM