THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2020 N AThroughout much of the Northeast and
the West Coast, more than 80 percent of
people wore masks when within six feet of
someone else. In more conservative areas,
like the Southeast, the share was closer to
50 percent.
A March survey found that partisanship
was the biggest predictor of whether
Americans regularly wore masks — bigger
than their age or whether they lived in a
region with a high number of virus cases.
In many of the places where people
adopted a hostile view of masks, including
Texas and the Southeast, the number of vi-
rus cases began to soar this spring.
Virus Economics’ First Rule
Throughout March and April, Gov. Brian
Kemp of Georgia and staff members held
long meetings inside a conference room at
the State Capitol in Atlanta. They ordered
takeout lunches from local restaurants like
the Varsity and held two daily conference
calls with the public health department,
the National Guard and other officials.
One of the main subjects of the meetings
was when to end Georgia’s lockdown and
reopen the state’s economy. By late April,
Mr. Kemp decided that it was time.
Georgia had not met the reopening cri-
teria laid out by the Trump administration
(and many outside health experts consid-
ered those criteria too lax). The state was
reporting about 700 new cases a day, more
than when it shut down on April 3.
Nonetheless, Mr. Kemp went ahead. He
said that Georgia’s economy could not wait
any longer, and it became one of the first
states to reopen.
“I don’t give a damn about politics right
now,” he said at an April 20 news confer-
ence announcing the reopening. He went
on to describe business owners with em-
ployees at home who were “going broke,
worried about whether they can feed their
children, make the mortgage payment.”
Four days later, across Georgia, barbers
returned to their chairs, wearing face
masks and latex gloves. Gyms and bowling
alleys were allowed to reopen, followed by
restaurants on April 27. The stay-at-home
order expired at 11:59 p.m. on April 30.
Mr. Kemp’s decision was part of a pat-
tern: Across the United States, caseloads
were typically much higher when the econ-
omy reopened than in other countries.
As the United States endured weeks of
closed stores and rising unemployment
this spring, many politicians — particu-
larly Republicans, like Mr. Kemp — argued
that there was an unavoidable trade-off be-
tween public health and economic health.
And if crushing the virus meant ruining the
economy, maybe the side effects of the
treatment were worse than the disease.
Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant
governor of Texas, put the case most
bluntly, and became an object of scorn, es-
pecially from the political left, for doing so.
“There are more important things than liv-
ing,” Mr. Patrick said in a television inter-
view the same week that Mr. Kemp re-
opened Georgia.
It may have been an inartful line, but Mr.
Patrick’s full argument was not wholly dis-
missive of human life. He was instead sug-
gesting that the human costs of shutting
down the economy — the losses of jobs and
income and the associated damages to liv-
ing standards and people’s health — were
greater than the costs of a virus that kills
only a small percentage of people who get
it.
“We are crushing the economy,” he said,
citing the damage to his own children and
grandchildren. “We’ve got to take some
risks and get back in the game and get this
country back up and running.”
The trouble with the argument, epidemi-
ologists and economists agree, was that
public health and the economy’s health
were not really in conflict.
Early in the pandemic, Austan Goolsbee,
a University of Chicago economist and for-
mer Obama administration official, pro-
posed what he called the first rule of virus
economics: “The best way to fix the econ-
omy is to get control of the virus,” he said.
Until the virus was under control, many
people would be afraid to resume normal
life and the economy would not function
normally.
The events of the last few months have
borne out Mr. Goolsbee’s prediction. Even
before states announced shutdown orders
in the spring, many families began sharply
reducing their spending. They were re-
sponding to their own worries about the vi-
rus, not any official government policy.
And the end of lockdowns, like Georgia’s,
did not fix the economy’s problems. It in-
stead led to a brief increase in spending
and hiring that soon faded.
In the weeks after states reopened, the
virus began surging. Those that opened
earliest tended to have worse outbreaks,
according to a Times analysis. The South-
east fared especially badly.
In June and July, Georgia reported more
than 125,000 new virus cases, turning it
into one of the globe’s new hot spots. That
was more new cases than Canada, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan and Australia com-
bined during that time frame.
Americans, frightened by the virus’s re-
surgence, responded by visiting restau-
rants and stores less often. The number of
Americans filing new claims for unemploy-
ment benefits has stopped falling. The
economy’s brief recovery in April and May
seems to have petered out in June and July.
In large parts of the United States, offi-
cials chose to reopen before medical ex-
perts thought it wise, in an attempt to put
people back to work and spark the econ-
omy. Instead, the United States sparked a
huge new virus outbreak — and the econ-
omy did not seem to benefit.
“Politicians are not in control,” Mr.
Goolsbee said. “They got all the illness and
still didn’t fix their economies.”
The situation is different in the Euro-
pean Union and other regions that have
had more success reducing new virus
cases. Their economies have begun show-
ing some promising signs, albeit tentative
ones. In Germany, retail sales and industri-
al production have risen, and the most re-
cent unemployment rate was 6.4 percent.
In the United States, it was 11.1 percent.The Message Is the Response
The United States has not performed
uniquely poorly on every measure of the
virus response.
Mask wearing is more common than
throughout much of Scandinavia and Aus-
tralia, according to surveys by YouGov and
Imperial College London. The total death
rate is still higher in Spain, Italy and Brit-
ain.
But there is one way — in addition to the
scale of the continuing outbreaks and
deaths — that the United States stands
apart: In no other high-income country
have the messages from political leaders
been nearly so mixed and confusing.
These messages, in turn, have been am-
plified by television stations and websites
friendly to the Republican Party, especially
Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast
Group, which operates almost 200 local
stations. To anybody listening to the coun-
try’s politicians or watching these televi-
sion stations, it would have been difficult to
know how to respond to the virus.
Mr. Trump’s comments, in particular,
have regularly contradicted the views of
scientists and medical experts.
The day after the first American case
was diagnosed, he said, “We have it totally
under control.” In late February, he said:
“It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like
a miracle — it will disappear.” Later, he in-
correctly stated that any American who
wanted a test could get one. On July 28, he
falsely proclaimed that “large portions of
our country” were “corona-free.”
He has also promoted medical misinfor-
mation about the virus. In March, Mr.
Trump called it “very mild” and suggested
it was less deadly than the common flu. He
has encouraged Americans to treat it with
the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine,
despite a lack of evidence about its effec-
tiveness and concerns about its safety. At
one White House briefing, he mused aloud
about injecting people with disinfectant to
treat the virus.
These comments have helped create a
large partisan divide in the country, with
Republican-leaning voters less willing to
wear masks or remain socially distant.
Some Democratic-leaning voters and less
political Americans, in turn, have decided
that if everybody is not taking the virus se-
riously, they will not either. State leaders
from both parties have sometimes created
so many exceptions about which work-
places can continue operating normallythat their stay-at-home orders have had
only modest effects.
“It doesn’t seem we have had the same
unity of purpose that I would have ex-
pected,” Ms. Rivers, the Johns Hopkins epi-
demiologist, said. “You need everyone to
come together to accomplish something
big.”
Across much of Europe and Asia, as well
as in Canada, Australia and elsewhere,
leaders have delivered a consistent mes-
sage: The world is facing a deadly virus,
and only careful, consistent action will pro-
tect people.
Many of those leaders have then pur-
sued aggressive action. Mr. Trump and his
top aides, by contrast, persuaded them-
selves in April that the virus was fading.
They have also declined to design a na-
tional strategy for testing or other virus re-
sponses, leading to a chaotic mix of state
policies.
“If you had to summarize our approach,
it’s really poor federal leadership — disor-
ganization and denial,” said Andy Slavitt,
who ran Medicare and Medicaid from 2015
to 2017. “Watch Angela Merkel. Watch how
she communicates with the public. Watch
how Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand does
it. They’re very clear. They’re very consis-
tent about what the most important priori-
ties are.”
New York — both the city and the state
— offers a useful case study. Like much of
Europe, New York responded too slowly to
the first wave of the virus. As late as March
15, Mayor Bill de Blasio encouraged people
to go to their neighborhood bar.
Soon, the city and state were over-
whelmed. Ambulances wailed day and
night. Hospitals filled to the breaking point.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — a Democrat, like
Mr. de Blasio — was slow to protect nursing
home residents, and thousands died. Earli-
er action in New York could have saved a
significant number of lives, epidemiolo-
gists say.
By late March, however, New York’s
leaders understood the threat, and they re-
versed course.
They insisted that people stay home.
They repeated the message every day, of-
ten on television. When other states began
reopening, New York did not. “You look at
the states that opened fast without metrics,
without guardrails, it’s a boomerang,” Mr.
Cuomo said on June 4.
The lockdowns and the consistent mes-
sages had a big effect. By June, New York
and surrounding states had some of the
lowest rates of virus spread in the country.
Across much of the Southeast, Southwest
and West Coast, on the other hand, the pan-
demic was raging.
Many experts now say that the most dis-
appointing part of the country’s failure is
that the outcome was avoidable.
What may not have been avoidable was
the initial surge of the virus: The world’s
success in containing previous viruses, like
SARS, had lulled many people into think-
ing a devastating pandemic was unlikely.
That complacency helps explains China’s
early mistakes, as well as the terrible death
tolls in the New York region, Italy, Spain,
Belgium, Britain and other parts of Eu-
rope.
But these countries and dozens more —
as well as New York — have since shown
that keeping the virus in check is feasible.
For all of the continuing uncertainty
about how this new coronavirus is trans-
mitted and how it affects the human body,
much has become clear. It often spreads in-
doors, with close human contact. Talking,
singing, sneezing and coughing play a ma-
jor role in transmission. Masks reduce the
risk. Restarting normal activity almost al-
ways leads to new cases that require quick
action — testing, tracing of patients and
quarantining — to keep the virus in check.
When countries and cities have heeded
these lessons, they have rapidly reduced
the spread of the virus and been able to
move back, gingerly, toward normal life. In
South Korea, fans have been able to attend
baseball games in recent weeks. In Den-
mark, Italy and other parts of Europe, chil-
dren have returned to school.
In the United States, the virus continues
to overwhelm daily life.
“This isn’t actually rocket science,” said
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the New
York City health department and the C.D.C.
for a combined 15 years. “We know what to
do, and we’re not doing it.”After a monthslong lockdown, New York had one of the country’s lowest rates of virus spread by
June. But some epidemiologists say the city responded too slowly to the first wave of infections.
HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES
The first day of classes at Lafayette High School in Oxford, Miss., on Wednesday. Many schools
across the nation will struggle to reopen while infections are continuing to rise in their states.RORY DOYLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESNUMBER OF DAYS SINCE REOPENING REOPENED LATER110 90 70 50100200300400AlabamaArizonaCaliforniaFloridaGeorgiaLouisianaMichiganMississippiMissouriNevadaSouth
CarolinaNew JerseyNew YorkOklahomaTe x a sMarch April May June July Belgium
South KoreaSwedenBritainUnited StatesSource: New York Times database. Note: Includes all countries with a
G.D.P. per capita of more than $25,000 that have a population of at least
10 million people.Source: New York Times database. Note: South Dakota had not ordered closures
but updated guidance for businesses and residents on April 28.The U.S. Is Seeing More Deaths Per Capita
Deaths per million people
30252015105casesdeathsAverage new cases per million nowStates That Reopened Sooner Are
Seeing Bigger OutbreaksTHE NEW YORK TIMESTracking an OutbreakU.S. Response