Topping that news is the Department of Labor report out this morning that 2.9 million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, more than quadruple the highest number ever seen.[3] Hypothetically, that number will come down as the virus recedes and employers re-fill the same jobs, but it remains a staggering indicator of how unprepared SARS-CoV-2 found the United States. Even the American precious metals market, often a place to which scared investors flee during stock panics and bank runs, seems to be nearly at a freezing point.[4]

It’s like this across the globe, right? No, it is not. Objectively, there are other parts of the world that are handling this virus much better than we are. South Korea and Japan, who learned they had infected citizens at the same time as the United States, managed to ‘flatten the curve’ by aggressive contact tracing, bombardments of public service announcements, and very broad testing.[5]
Singapore worked so hard at tracing and quarantining that they were able to reopen schools quickly. By contrast, our contact tracing has been negligible and we are seeing mysterious outbreaks popping up in places like Albany, Georgia, far away from major outbreak cities and with no known connection to travelers from Asia or Europe.[6] Our economic response to the chaos has also been substandard. The EU, for instance, is paying companies to keep employees even while quarantining. They’ve mostly avoided the mass unemployment we are seeing and are able to incentivize people to stay home.

Why is the United States so unprepared in comparison? Why have we become an object lesson for the rest of the world? Scholars, epidemiologists, and politicians are going to study this question for decades to come. I am convinced, here on March 26, that this has happened because of systemic failures across our society. Our president and his supporters have shown themselves willing to put their personal political agendas before the uncomfortable truths that would save the lives of their constituents. There has been a failure by our leadership to create a unified, effective message that would mobilize the American public, a failure by the hobbled political left to lambast those incompetent leaders and demand effective messaging, a failure of experts to very clear on basic issues like the merits of wearing masks and social distancing, a collapse in the process of peer-review that has led bad science to get pre-printed and then quoted as fact, an inability or unwillingness by Americans to recognize the importance of good, hard science, combined with a desire to believe non-experts who have no actual knowledge on the issue—all because it confirms their own pre-established beliefs and is repeated ad nauseum by Fox News, a profound lack of care and concern for the Black and brown citizens of this nation, and for the poor, who will bear the brunt of this disease, a generations-long tendency in business and in governance to prioritize quick profits over long-term planning, an utter disregard by our leaders for public health, and a toxic legacy of American “victory culture,” that makes so many people in this nation incapable of humility or sacrifice.[7] The parallels with the collapse of Rome are unmistakable, except Rome lasted for a thousand years.

Then again, as Paul Simon reminds us, “we can’t be forever blessed.”