How divided were Americans early on in the pandemic? The answer might surprise you.
When Covid arrived on American shores, the United States did not have to collapse into Covid partisanship, with citizen turning against citizen and each party vilifying the other as the source of our national misery. |
 | | Ibrahim Rayintakath |
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 | By David Wallace-Wells Opinion Writer |
Now that the pandemic emergency looks to be, to most Americans, fully behind us, the age of retrospectives and autopsies has begun in earnest. For many looking back on the brutality of the past three years, the story of America's failure in the face of Covid-19 begins with partisanship — with liberals generally blaming Republicans for doing too little to stop the spread of the disease, conservatives generally blaming Democrats for having done too much in the name of mitigation and almost everyone on both sides believing that polarization hamstrung the country right from the start. |
As persuasive as those accounts may seem, on first blush, they turn out to be almost entirely wrong. This is one of the central revelations of "Lessons From the Covid War, an Investigative Report," written by 34 experts and published in April by PublicAffairs — which is likely to be as close as the country gets to a 9/11 Report-style pandemic retrospective. |
As counterintuitive as the proposition sounds, it is borne out by almost every statistical measure of the U.S. Covid response: For almost all of the first year of the pandemic, there was essentially no policy difference at all between red states and blue states. Shelter-in-place orders were issued by Republican governors and Democratic governors at almost exactly the same time, and while those in blue states lasted on average seven weeks rather than five, the difference was only two weeks in what became a 171-week federal pandemic emergency. Business restrictions were almost uniform across the country through the summer and fall of 2020, as were masking guidance and even school policy. |
There were rhetorical differences throughout the first year of the pandemic, of course, embodied by the polarizing and dismissive performance of President Donald Trump. But at the state and local level, red states and blue states moved almost perfectly in unison. For the most part, red and blue people seemed to, as well. |
Data drawn from every aspect of mitigation policy tells the same story: Covid partisanship only became significant with the presidential election and the arrival of vaccines. Which means that, while there may be many reasons to feel fatalistic about the American pandemic response, polarization probably shouldn't inherently be one of them. For almost a full year, Covid policy actually showed no sign of our seemingly unavoidable culture wars. Believe it or not. |
| READ DAVID'S FULL ESSAY HERE | | |
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