Thread by @shadihamid

Something about the U.S. response to COVID has been bothering me, and it goes well beyond the president's own failures. In this new essay, I explore how anti-Trump narratives misled Americans about how exceptional we were—or weren't

[Thread]

wisdomofcrowds.live/is-trump-respo…

Media outlets endlessly pushed an all-consuming narrative—that America's handling of COVID was uniquely bad and that Americans themselves were incapable of collective action. If only we could be more like Europe! These assertions are misleading, at best. They are also wrong.

Mainstream outlets weren't lying. They did excellent, mostly accurate reporting. But facts can be accurate while distorting our sense of what's real. One example is how infections and deaths were reported, without adjusting for population

wisdomofcrowds.live/is-trump-respo…

Americans were also hurt by the nationalization of news in a country that was starting to look like 50 individual units, with drastically different COVID caseloads and policies. Most of us were following the national numbers, but were those the most relevant metric?

After the second wave affecting states like Florida and Texas, the numbers seemed terrible—and they were. Panic was understandable. But if you were in, say, Maryland, the alarming figures from Texas weren't necessarily relevant to your own daily precautions and risk calculus

So you basically had this weird situation where, because COVID became partisan problem with Trump at the fore, everything was nationalized. But this was akin to a German in Bavaria reading about rising cases in France and then changing his mind about going to his local restaurant

It's good to be anti-Trump. But it's not good to let anti-Trumpism distort your coverage. Every day, national news promoted the (incorrect) narrative that the US was uniquely bad at fighting COVID. People, especially liberals, trusted the narrative and it led to unjustified panic

In my experience, friends and acquaintances who are the most alarmist about COVID are the *least* aware of what DC's daily case counts are. They're closer to Germany than they are to Florida—in other words, they're very low

wisdomofcrowds.live/is-trump-respo…

Since our May 1 peak, DC testing has gone up 600%, yet daily cases are *down* by 86%. But to even know that you actually have to spend time looking for the information on specialized websites and doing your own calculations

Daily cases as a percentage of total population in #Germany (the most impressive for a large EU country) are .001%. In #DC, the comparable number is .008%. Yet, there are still young, non-immunocompromised people who will only do "socially distanced" meetups, whatever that means

"Hygiene theater" has become the norm across the country despite CDC guidance that surface contact is not a primary means of transmission. COVID alarmism isn't actually about fighting COVID; it's about performative acts to stave off fear and uncertainty: wisdomofcrowds.live/is-trump-respo…