Time September 21/September 28, 2020tion’s “Operation Warp Speed,” an effort
to accelerate vaccine development. The
logic of focusing so heavily on magic-
wand solutions fails to account for the
many people who will suffer and die in
the meantime even while effective strate-
gies to fight COVID-19 already exist.
We’re also struggling because of the
U.S. health care system. The country
spends nearly 17% of annual GDP on
health care—far more than any other na-
tion in the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development. Yet it
has one of the lowest life expectancies,
at 78.6 years, comparable to those in
countries like Estonia and Turkey, which
spend only 6.4% and 4.2% of their GDP
on health care, respectively. Even the gov-
ernment’s decision to cover coronavirus-
related treatment costs has ended up in
confusion and fear among lower income
patients thanks to our dysfunctional med-
ical billing system.
The coronavirus has laid bare the in-
equalities of American public health.
Black Americans are nearly three times
as likely as white Americans to get
COVID-19, nearly five times as likely to
be hospitalized and twice as likely to die.
As the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) notes, being Black in
the U.S. is a marker of risk for underly-
ing conditions that make COVID-19 more
dangerous, “including socioeconomic sta-
tus, access to health care and increased ex-
posure to the virus due to occupation (e.g.,
frontline, essential and critical infrastruc-
ture workers).” In other words, COVID-19
is more dangerous for Black Americans
because of generations of systemic racism
and discrimination. The same is true to a
lesser extent for Native American and La-
tino communities, according to CDC data.
COVID-19, like any virus, is mindless;
it doesn’t discriminate based on the color
of a person’s skin or the figure in their
checking account. But precisely because
it attacks blindly, the virus has given fur-
ther evidence for the truth that was made
clear this summer in response to another
of the country’s epidemics, racially moti-
vated police violence: the U.S. has not ad-
equately addressed its legacy of racism.AmericAns todAy tend to vAlue the
individual over the collective. A 2011 Pew
survey found that 58% of Americans said
“freedom to pursue life’s goals without in-
terference from the state” is more impor-
tant than the state guaranteeing “nobody
is in need.” It’s easy to view that trait as a
root cause of the country’s struggles with
COVID-19; a pandemic requires people to
make temporary sacrifices for the benefit
of the group, whether it’s wearing a mask
or skipping a visit to their local bar.
Americans have banded together in
times of crisis before, but we need to be
led there. “We take our cues from lead-
ers,” says Dr. David Rosner, a professor
at Columbia University. Trump and other
leaders on the right, including Gov. Ron
DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Tate Reeves
of Mississippi, respectively, have dispar-
aged public- health officials, criticizing
their calls for shutting down businesses
and other drastic but necessary measures.
Many public-health experts, meanwhile,
are concerned that the White House is
pressuring agencies like the Food and
Drug Administration to approve treat-
ments such as convalescent plasma de-
spite a lack of supportive data. Gover-
nors, left largely on their own, have beena mixed bag, and even those who’ve been
praised, like New York’s Andrew Cuomo,
could likely have taken more aggressive
action to protect public health.
Absent adequate leadership, it’s been
up to everyday Americans to band to-
gether in the fight against COVID-19. To
some extent, that’s been happening—
doctors, nurses, bus drivers and other es-
sential workers have been rightfully cel-
ebrated as heroes, and many have paid
a price for their bravery. But at least some
Americans still refuse to take such a sim-
ple step as wearing a mask.
Why? Because we’re also in the midst
of an epistemic crisis. Republicans and
Democrats today don’t just disagree on is-
sues; they disagree on the basic truths that
structure their respective realities. Half
the country gets its news from places that
parrot whatever the Administration says,
true or not; half does not. This politici-
zation manifests in myriad ways, but the
most vital is this: in early June (at which
point more than 100,000 Americans had
already died of COVID-19), fewer than half
of Republican voters polled said the out-
break was a major threat to the health of
the U.S. population as a whole. Through-
out July and August, the White House’s
Coronavirus Task Force was sending pri-
vate messages to states about the severity
of the outbreak, while President Trump
and Vice President Mike Pence publicly
stated that everything was under control.
Some incredulity about the virus and
public- health recommendations is un-
derstandable given the reality that scien-
tific understanding of the newly emer-
gent virus is evolving in real time. The
ever shifting advice from health officials
doesn’t instill public confidence, espe-