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1. This may sound a little odd, but I think the reason the coronavirus has done so much damage in the US is that it's really bad and yet it's not quite bad enough.
2. When I say "it's not bad enough" I mean that it's not bad enough for Americans, in general, to stay focused for a long period of time on controlling it. Americans are good at responding to immediate crises. We are not that good at long-term, somewhat ambiguous, problems.
3. Covid, in that sense, was tailor-made to exploit our weaknesses as a polity. It's contagious, but not super-contagious, like measles. It's deadly, but most of its victims are old and/or already sick, which makes it easier for most ppl to think they're not really at risk.
4. And there's plainly an element of randomness in the way Covid attacks - most infected ppl seem to transmit the virus to one or two others, if any, while a few transmit it to many. And some places that locked down were hit really hard, while places that didn't weren't.
5. The point is simply that all of these factors have made it easy to believe that the disease is someone else's problem, something that was amplified by the fact that for months, only a small number of (mostly blue) states were being hit hard by it.
6. And the fact that there's no 1-to-1 correlation between lockdowns, or mask-wearing, and good results has contributed to a sense of "we can't really do anything about it."
7. That feeling of "what's the point?" is, in one way, very un-American. But in another, it fits the way we often deal with long-term problems - like acid rain or the ozone layer or, now, climate change. We do little until it becomes absolutely necessary to do something.
8. Clearly, had we had better national leadership (or any national leadership), we would have had better outcomes. But that was very much not in the cards with Trump in the WH. So now it feels like we're just going to meander along, accepting our fate, until a vaccine appears.
