32 Scientific American, March 2022degree that is commensurate with the size
and complexity of today’s globalized societies.
In a sense, the entanglement of our every-
day lives made us all the more vulnerable to
an airborne virus that demanded social isola-
tion, blowing up the facade of normalcy in
the spring of 2020. The new COVID normal,
with its mask wearing, social distancing,
lockdowns and closed schools, compelled us
to abandon our most basic instincts and turn
away from our closest friends and family. It
rent the social fabric on which we all rely.
Infectious diseases present an unusual
challenge: to combat them effectively, we
must render aid appropriately and consistent-
ly at scale. This pandemic exposed the fragili-
ty and faults in each layer of our lives—from
our innermost circle of family and friends to
the nation state at the periphery—and the dif-
ferential risk experienced by any individual’s
core community. Communities that were al-
ready heavily invested in social safety nets
with measures such as paid sick leave were
able to lower COVID rates. Those invested in
the ideology of self-sufficiency and individual-
ism prolonged suffering and loss of life.
New Zealand (Aotearoa in M ̄aori), a coun-
try with a long history of reckoning with its
colonial past and building community, has
been a standout success story in the pandem-
ic. The government there countered COVID
with nationwide stay-at-home orders, border
controls, hygiene campaigns, accessible test-
ing and contact tracing. The results were
dramatic: 18 months into the pandemic, the
country had seen only 27 COVID deaths. By
late 2021, 90 percent of eligible citizens were
fully vaccinated. Although new variants have
been challenging these successes, the govern-
ment remains deeply committed to care.
Similarly, Taiwan defied predictions that
it would struggle with COVID infections like
its neighbors in China by instituting a 14-
day isolation policy for travelers entering
the country, stepping up mask production,
increasing border controls and deputizing
quarantine officers who could help isolated
citizens. By March 2021 there had been only
10 COVID deaths in a country of nearly 24
million people. Taiwan has fought each new
wave of the pandemic with these tactics. Al-
though we may call on our inner circle most
frequently during our times of need, ulti-
mately we must rely on local and national
officials on the periphery of our lives to be
exquisitely human—as the leaders of New
Zealand and Taiwan have been—when they
develop and enact health policies.
In the U.S., government support wasF
or countless AmericAns, there was
a dull but persistent pain to prepan-
demic life: high-priced housing, nearly
inaccessible health care, underresourced
schools, wage stagnation and systemic in-
equality. It was a familiar ache, a kind of
chronic hurt that people learned to live with
simply because they had no other choice.
Faced with threadbare safety nets and a cul-
tural ethos championing nationalist myths
of self-sufficiency, many people did what
humans have always done in times of need:
they sought emotional comfort and material
aid from their family and friends. But when
COVID-19 hit, relying on our immediate net-
works was not sufficient. Americans are gas-
lit into thinking that they are immeasurably
strong, impervious to the challenges people
in other countries face. In reality, our social
and economic support systems are weak,
and many people are made vulnerable by
nearly any change in their capacity to earn a
living. The fallout from the pandemic is an
urgent call to strengthen our aid systems.
Anthropologists have long recognized that
exceptionally high degrees of sociality, coop-
eration and communal care are hallmarks of
humankind, traits that separate us from our
closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and
bonobos. This interdependence has been key
to our success as a species. Viewed this way,
we humans have an evolutionary mandate to
be generous and take care of one another. But
unlike early humans, who lived in compara-
tively small groups, we cannot just rely on
our immediate family and friends for support.
We must invest in national policies of com-
munal care—policies that facilitate access to
resources for people who need help—to aA Microbe
Proved That
Individual ism
Is a Myth
Humans evolved to be
interdependent,notself-sufficientBy Robin G. Nelson