The Economist March 12th 2022 19
United StatesThepandemic
Must do better
T
wo years ago on March 11th, the World
Health Organisation declared covid
a pandemic. Americans are eager to leave
the wretchedness behind them. Some are
so anxious that they are driving trucks
along the Beltway around Washington, dc,
hoping to slow traffic in protest against
pandemic restrictions, inspired by disrup
tion in Canada last month. The “People’s
Convoy” looks strangely out of touch—not
because the truckers are alone in their de
sire to put covid restrictions in the rear
view mirror, but because so many restric
tions have already been falling away.
Polls suggest concern about covid is de
clining. Maskwearing has waned (a mask
less President Joe Biden hobnobbed insou
ciantly with members of Congress after his
stateoftheunion message last week). On
March 26th, Hawaii will become the final
state to drop its indoor mask mandate, and
the Centres for Disease Control and Pre
vention (cdc) now recommends masks on
ly for the 7% of Americans living in high
risk counties. The vast majority of schools
are open for inperson learning. Batman
fans packed into cinemas for the opening
weekend of the latest film in the franchise.
Some states have long been crowding
people into small spaces with few restric
tions. Over the past year Florida, Tennessee
and Texas banned local governments and
public schools from enforcing mask man
dates. Restrictions generally fell along par
tisan lines, with Democratic states stead
fastly adhering to them and Republican
states tossing them aside. Now even New
York, one of the first to impose a lockdown,
is starting to lighten up. New York state
ended its mask mandate for schools on
March 2nd; New York City lifted its own on
March 7th. Nationwide, the sevenday
moving average of deaths is at its lowest
since January 2nd; that of reported cases is
at its lowest since the Delta variant began
surging in July 2021. For most Americans,
covid restrictions are in the past.
In short, the pandemic has reached a
punctuation point. Even if it is a comma
rather than a full stop, it is a good time to
look back at how the country has fared, and
ahead to the next phase.
America has been hit hard by covid. Ov
er 950,000 people have died from the virus, according to the cdc, though The Econ-
omist estimates that the actual count is
1.1m1.3m. America has the highest death
rate among rich countries: nearly double
the average (see chart on next page). Many
expected America to respond well to a pan
demic. Instead, it vastly underperformed.
It has struggled to vaccinate its people:
65% are fully vaccinated, compared with
72% in Britain, 73% in the European Union,
81% in Canada and 95% in the United Arab
Emirates. America also fell behind on de
tection. Last year it ranked 36th in the
world in sequencing sarscov2, hinder
ing early recognition of new variants. The
country also lagged behind in testing.
Whereas Britons have had access to free
rapid tests for over a year, Americans re
ceived their first round only last month.
Lab tests were hard to come by, too: queues
and waits for results were long.
The United States is the only highin
come country without universal health
care. One in eight adults reports not going
to a doctor in the past year because of the
cost. The pandemic has aggravated the pro
blem of access. Hospital capacity was
strained, and many elective procedures de
layed. Some states enacted crisis standards
of care, a protocol to delineate who re
ceives treatment when resources are
scarce. “Now that the covid admission
numbers are falling, we still have enor
mous numbers of patients requiring ad
mission because of delays of care that have
been occurring all through the pandemic,”
says Jeffrey Balser, the ceoof VanderbiltWASHINGTON, DC
America’s covid death rate has been nearly double that of other rich countries.
As the pandemic moves into a new phase, what are the lessons?
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