As we trudge on toward a year since my company sent us to work from home and the Bay Area and State of California closed down, I find myself thinking about Australia.
One of my sisters happens to live there now, a decision that seemed a little unwise at this time last year when large parts of that continent were on fire. But since the pandemic, it's seemed a little wiser - she's still working from home but the shops and restaurants are open, she can see her friends, and life looks to have gone back to something approaching normal.
More gallingly, a google search for "Covid Australia" brings up a little graph that indicates two points. One is that the deadliest day for Australia during the pandemic was 4 September, when 59 people died of the disease - more people died yesterday of the coronavirus in the US than in Australia since the pandemic began. The more damning statistic is that Australia appears not to have had a Covid-19 death since 28 October.
I'm not saying Australia is easy to emulate. For one thing, it's an island/continent way out in the Southern Hemisphere, relatively far from anywhere else - because it's the only nation on that continent/island it's easy to limit travel in and out. It's also not the country with the best Covid response, nor even in the top five - the likes of Taiwan and New Zealand and Vietnam have all had fewer than 40 deaths. By the way, for some reason my source doesn't mention Mongolia, which has had a whopping 2 deaths from the coronavirus - wtf?
But Australia, like New Zealand, Taiwan, Iceland, Singapore and Vietnam, has set out explicitly to eliminate the virus from its shores. They haven't eliminated it completely, as yesterday there were 6 new cases reported in Australia, but it's clear that setting an ambitious goal to get to zero has allowed Australia to take steps that let it get the virus under control.
I contrast that with the response here, where from the start the talk has been to "flatten the curve". The implication being that we'll all get the virus anyway, but we should at least make sure that we don't overload our local health services when we do.
Except, news flash: there were parts of the holiday season just gone when certain regions of California had no ICU beds available for severe cases. Own goal.
There might be a lot of immediate reasons for this - it could even be that hospital groups want a certain amount of traffic to come their way, since they get paid per procedure here in the US. But more important is the idea that we've become so unwilling to swing for the fences that we think we can't do any better. And so the message from Washington DC and from Sacramento has focused on slowing the spread, rather than stopping it.
As a country, we seem to have thrown up our hands and given up on all of the problems facing us. We did it in 2012, when Sandy Hook Elementary was shot up; since then the Onion has had to regularly trot out its school shooting headline: "No Way to Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
We did it in 2014 when Michael Brown was shot in the back by a police officer. And we did it in 2009 when the Affordable Care Act added a layer of complexity to our already byzantine healthcare system. We're doing it again in 2020/2021, with the coronavirus and the California wildfires and the complete disintegration of Texas's unregulated power grid following a once-in-a-lifetime winter storm.
That last one, incidentally, is the granddaddy of them all, because we've also thrown up our hands and given up on tackling climate change, which means these once-in-a-lifetime storms are going to become once-a-year storms.
We've given up on tackling income inequality, finding people good jobs after technology has made their existing ones obsolete, securing our government and election infrastructure from foreign and domestic cyberattacks, supporting our allies in Europe and Asia, preserving abortion rights here at home, and on finding ways for convicts and veterans to re-enter society.
A blogger my girlfriend reads notes that countries descend into fascism when elites can't even recognize that problems exist - his point is that with each of these problems we fail to tackle, we inch (or stride, or even leap) closer to the day when a presidential candidate succeeds in subverting the democratic process to take power and eliminate his enemies. And that's the most heartbreaking thing we've given up on: rule of law and protecting democratic norms, following the coup attempt on 6 January at the Capitol.
America likes to say it's number one, but we're not doing anything to maintain that status. And if America ceases to be the guarantor of personal and political freedoms (even when it's denied those freedoms to people in the Global South), there's no telling how long countries with open societies and liberal democracy will be able to hold onto their own freedoms.
Sort it out, America.
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