[ “If you want people to do the right thing you have to make it
easy, and we’ve made it hard.”] [[link removed]]

WHEN ‘THE AMERICAN WAY’ MET THE CORONAVIRUS  
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Bryce Covert
December 29, 2020
The New York Times
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_ “If you want people to do the right thing you have to make it
easy, and we’ve made it hard.” _

Officials like Gov. Andrew Cuomo have sometimes treated coronavirus
cases as evidence of Americans’ personal failures, ignoring the
government’s own failures.Credit..., Photo: George Etheredge

 

The end of the year has been awkward for Gov. Andrew Cuomo. As he
promotes his new, self-congratulatory book about navigating New York
through its first coronavirus wave in the spring, he is also battling
a new surge of cases.

He’s not been too happy. At a news conference
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late November, he lashed out at his constituents.

“I just want to make it very simple,” he said
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socially distanced and you wore a mask, and you were smart, none of
this would be a problem. It’s all self-imposed. It’s all
self-imposed. If you didn’t eat the cheesecake, you wouldn’t have
a weight problem.”

His blunt rhetoric exemplifies how political leaders — in Washington
and in red and blue states — are responding to the Covid-19 crisis.
They’ve increasingly decided to treat the pandemic as an issue of
personal responsibility — much as our country confronts other social
ills, like poverty or joblessness.

Yes, it’s absolutely critical that we wear masks and continue to
keep our distance. But these individual actions were never meant to be
our primary or only response to the pandemic.

 

Instead, more than 10 months into this crisis, our government has
largely failed to act. There is no national infrastructure for testing
or tracing. States have been put in a bind by federal failure, but
even so, many governors have dithered on taking large-scale actions to
suppress the current surge.

As Governor Cuomo excoriated New Yorkers about mask-wearing, he took
no responsibility for not shutting down
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dining for weeks, well into the new spike.

“We’re putting a lot of faith in individual actions and individual
collective wisdom to do the right thing,” Rachel Werner, the
executive director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics
at the University of Pennsylvania, told me, “but it’s without any
leadership.”

It’s no great mystery what the government could do to control the
virus. Every expert I spoke to agreed on the No. 1 priority: testing.

“The primary thing we really should have had is ubiquitous testing,
and the government has just not chosen to do that,” said Ashish Jha,
the dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University and an
early adviser to the White House Covid task force.

States can do only so much with their limited resources to roll out a
testing regime; it requires the resources and heft of the federal
government. And while the year-end relief legislation provides more
money for testing, it’s not nearly enough, particularly for
producing and sustaining rapid testing.

Dr. Jha said that early in his time on the task force there was a lot
of interest in building a robust testing system. “But it was killed
by the political leadership in the White House,” he said.

Then, the Trump administration allowed financial aid to businesses and
households to dry up during some of the worst months of the pandemic
— and only just struck a last-minute deal to partly revive it.

The inconsistent aid had a cascading effect. Governors like Mr. Cuomo,
who don’t have the budgetary ability of the federal government to
extend substantial business relief, ended up in a difficult situation
as the virus surged in late summer and fall. New York had to keep
high-risk businesses open, it was argued, so that they could earn
whatever meager revenue they could. But what is “the economy”
worth if it comes at the cost of our physical well-being, our very
lives?

Calling
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restrictions “Orwellian,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press
secretary, said on “Fox & Friends” in late November that “the
American people are a freedom-loving people” who “make responsible
health decisions as individuals.” That, she said, is “the American
way.”

I agree with her on one point: It is the American way to champion
individualism over collective obligation. In 2019, 34 million
Americans
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lived below the poverty line in this country, with many millions more
struggling just above it — and that number has only increased since
then. We could lift every family out of poverty by sending
out regular checks
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other countries use taxes to fund benefits that significantly reduce
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poverty rates. Poverty, then, is a policy choice.

The pandemic gave us a crystal-clear window into this. The
government’s initial response kept poverty from rising
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But once stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits started
expiring, millions of people
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pushed into destitution. It took Congress months to reach a deal to
send more help, and even so, the latest relief bill cut back on
stimulus spending and slashed supplementary federal unemployment
benefits in half.

“We’ve basically had a complete abdication of the federal
response,” Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor in epidemiology
of microbial diseases at Yale, told me when asked about the interplay
between public health and economic struggles.

If we want people to take individual actions to help curb the spread
of the virus, we also need to invest in their ability to do so. The
government could send every household masks — a plan the Trump
administration nixed
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on. It could pay Americans to stay home if they feel sick, test
positive or work for a business that should close for public health
reasons, to avoid choosing between their health and their bills.

“If you want people to do the right thing you have to make it easy,
and we’ve made it hard,” Dr. Gonsalves noted. States, too, have
been told they’re on their own, with Congressional Republicans
refusing to agree to the money Democrats want to send to help fill the
vast hole left by the pandemic. In response, some governors seem to be
prioritizing businesses over public health, handing out ineffectual
curfews to restaurants and bars rather than just shutting them down.

But to help small businesses, and to return to strong economic growth,
tamping down the pandemic still has to come first.

“There’s no realistic prospect of fostering a complete and durable
recovery until the public health situation has been brought under
control,” said David Wilcox, an economist and senior fellow at the
Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The last 10 months have given us a very clear message: We are
inextricably connected to each other. We can’t stay healthy unless
our neighbors can do so, too. The economy can’t properly function if
Americans are sick and dying. The economy is only a means to an end, a
way to improve living conditions. The economy should serve us — we
cannot sacrifice our lives at its altar.

_Bryce Covert is a NY Times contributing opinion writer on the
economy, politics and policy._

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