Thread by @dwallacewells

One thing I left out of yesterday's big COVID piece: a press critique. Hardly any of the retrospective journalistic accounts of the last year have even acknowledged that the U.S. had not an exceptional but a typical experience. A thread (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

In its way, this is not surprising—Americans contemplating the pandemic year would be foolish to overlook the many failures, mistakes, and unusually American problems that seemed to shape our experience of the disease, beginning with a sociopathically indifferent president.

Those failures are many: the FDA rejecting a coronavirus test the WHO had authorized, the CDC developing a faulty one of its own, the CDC meddled with and muzzled by federal higher-ups...

...the total failure to even try to stand up a national testing program of scale, or anything approaching surveillance testing at the state or local level either, states taking many months to build out contact tracing efforts, very limited support for self-quarantining...

...Andrew Cuomo's forcing nursing homes to accept positive cases back from the hospital, Jared Kushner’s desire to McKinsey the pandemic and hand the reins of public health over to governors and state health departments the feds then invariably undermined...

If you wanted to explain the devastating American pandemic through American policy failures, the evidence would seem to be there, the failures obvious to anyone looking.

So why did so many of the countries of Europe and indeed throughout the Americas fail at roughly the same scale? And what does it say about the obvious American errors that they were reproduced in most of the places the country considers as peers?

From a global perspective, one year in two very large facts about the course of the pandemic loom above all others...

First, that the policy levers Americans have obsessed over all year (mask-wearing, social distancing, lockdowns) can not be the sole drivers of transmission, given that states taking very different measures (California and Florida, most famously) performed quite similarly...

...and given how country's that were very strict (Peru, say, or Italy), did not reliably "outperform" those places which took much looser measures (Japan, say, or Sweden).

Second, as a group, the nations of the world once often grouped as "the west" — most of Europe and the Americas — had a categorically more catastrophic experience than anyone else.

The U.S. had many reasons to expect to outperform "peer" countries like Germany, the U.K., or the Netherlands (larger state and medical capacity, for instance)...

... though there were also reasons containing a pandemic here might've been more difficult (a large and diverse country, full of comorbidities, at the center of global commerce).

But as awful as the American experience seems to Americans, compared to the rest of Europe and the Americans it was, by the crude metric of deaths per million citizens, probably just a little bit worse than average—that is, not at all exceptional.

And yet in nearly every forensic account of the American pandemic published in recent months, the country's poor performance was explained almost entirely with reference to American policy choices, with hardly any acknowledgment of the global context of "western" failure.

Many of these accounts are by writers I admire enormously, and they do illuminate failures in the American response that should be addressed and ideally fixed in preparation for "the next time."

I'm thinking of, for instance, "How the U.S. Guaranteed Its Own Failure," in the @nytimes: nytimes.com/2021/01/17/us/…

Along with this fantastic CDC retrospective, in the same paper: nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/…

As far back as June, @DLeonhardt was writing about "the unique U.S. failure to control the virus." nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/…

The @washingtonpost CDC retrospective was also fantastically rich—and yet blinkered, in its way: washingtonpost.com/investigations…

In @theatlantic, @edyong209, perhaps the most valuable journalist working on the disease over the past year, reflected in August on "how the pandemic defeated America."

Link here: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

In May, in the same pages, George Packer wrote "the coronavirus didn't break America, it revealed what was already broken," in an essay headlined "We Are Living in a Failed State." theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

I'm guilty, too. In March, I published a piece called "America Is Broken." nymag.com/intelligencer/…

But the farther along we've gotten on the pandemic timeline, the clearer it's seemed that America is not nearly the outlier Americans — especially liberal Americans horrified by Trump — have believed it was.

And yet in retrospectives like @lawrence_wright's "The Plague Year," there was hardly any accounting of or reckoning with what might explain the similarity of American American experiences to those across Europe, Canada, and Latin America... newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…

—or what those similarities should tell us about how to regard particular policy choices and failures here.

I don't have anything approaching a final answer to these questions, but it is critical to raise them, and to begin to think about what this uniform failure says—about our own public health shortcomings, cultural and social weaknesses, perhaps the vulnerabilities of prosperity.

For most of the last year, under the leadership of the last person in the world you would want running the ship of state during a pandemic, Americans focused on that cancer at the top—understandably.

A year on, with vaccines mercifully delivering us into a pandemic endgame, our problems actually responding to the virus seem much bigger, more common and more complicated than Trump. Our journalism should begin to reflect that. (x/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…