OPINION
PAUL
KRUGMAN
How Covid Became a Red-State Crisis
July 29,
2021
By Paul
Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
Less than a
month ago President Biden promised a “summer of joy,” a return to normal life
made possible by the rapid progress of vaccinations against Covid-19. Since
then, however, vaccination has largely stalled — America, which had pulled
ahead of many other advanced countries, has fallen behind. And the rise of the
Delta variant has caused a surge in cases all too reminiscent of the repeated
Covid waves of last year.
That said,
2021 isn’t 2020 redux. As Aaron Carroll pointed out Tuesday in The Times, Covid
is now a crisis for the unvaccinated. Risks for vaccinated Americans aren’t
zero, but they’re vastly lower than for those who haven’t gotten a vaccine.
What
Carroll didn’t say, but is also true, is that Covid is now a crisis largely for
red states. And it’s important to make that point both to understand where we
are and as a reminder of the political roots of America’s pandemic failures.
Just to be
clear, I’m not saying that only Republicans are failing to get vaccinated. It’s
true that there are stark differences in attitudes toward the vaccines, with
one poll showing 47 percent of Republicans saying they are unlikely to get a
shot, compared with only 6 percent of Democrats. It’s also true that if we
compare U.S. counties, there’s a strong negative correlation between Donald
Trump’s share of the 2020 vote and the current vaccination rate.
That said,
vaccination rates among Black and Hispanic Americans remain persistently lower
than among the non-Hispanic white population, an indication that issues like
lack of information and trust are also inhibiting our response.
But simply
looking at who remains unvaccinated misses what may soon become a crucial
point: The danger from Covid’s resurgence depends not just on the number of
cases nationwide but also on how concentrated those cases are geographically.
To see why,
it may help to remember all the talk about “flattening the curve” early in the
pandemic.
At that
point effective vaccines seemed a distant prospect. This in turn made it seem
likely that a large fraction of the population would eventually contract the
virus whatever we did. Prevaccine, it seemed as if the only way to avoid
long-run mass infection was the New Zealand strategy: a severe lockdown to
reduce cases to a very low level, followed by a test-trace-isolate regime to
quickly put a lid on any flare-ups. And it seemed all too clear that the U.S.
lacked the political will to pursue such a strategy.
Yet there
was still good reason to impose social distancing rules and mask requirements.
Even if most people would eventually get the virus, it was important that they
not all get sick at once, because that would overload the health care system.
This would cause many preventable deaths, not just from Covid-19 but also
because other ailments couldn’t be treated if the hospitals, and especially
intensive care units, were already full.
This logic,
by the way, was why claims that mask mandates and distancing guidelines were
attacks on “freedom” were always nonsense. Do we think people should be free to
drive drunk? No, not just because in so doing they endanger themselves, but
even more because they endanger others. The same was true for refusing to wear
masks last year — and for refusing to get vaccinated now.
As it
turned out, masks and social distancing were even better ideas than we
realized: They bought time until the arrival of vaccines, so that a great
majority of those who managed to avoid Covid in 2020, and have since been
vaccinated, may never get it.
But there
are regions in America where large numbers of people have refused vaccination.
Those regions appear to be approaching the point we feared in the early stages
of the pandemic, with hospitalizations overwhelming the health care system. And
the divide between places that are in crisis and those that aren’t is starkly
political. New York has five Covid patients hospitalized per 100,000 people;
Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis barred businesses from requiring that their
patrons show proof of vaccination, has 34.
So, will
Covid’s resurgence stop America’s much-awaited return to normalcy? In much of
the country, no. Yes, vaccination has stalled far too soon even in blue states,
and residents of those states should be a bit more cautious, for example by
resuming mask-wearing when indoors (which many people in the Northeast never
stopped). But so far it doesn’t look as if the Delta variant will prevent
continuing recovery, social and economic.
There are,
however, places that really should put strong measures into effect — mask
mandates for sure, and maybe even partial lockdowns — to buy time while they
catch up on vaccinations.
Unfortunately,
these are precisely the places that will almost surely do no such thing.
Missouri is experiencing one of the worst current Covid outbreaks, yet on
Tuesday the St. Louis County Council voted to end a mask mandate introduced by
the county executive.
In any
case, it’s crucial to understand that we aren’t facing a national crisis; we’re
facing a red-state crisis, with nakedly political roots.
Paul
Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished
Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade
and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário