The covid has become a crisis of republican states

A nurse passes an empty waiting area at a mobile vaccination point set up in Detroit (USA) EMILY ELCONIN / Reuters

Less than a month ago, President Biden promised a "summer of joy," a return to normalcy made possible by the rapid advancement of covid-19 vaccination.

However, vaccination has stalled ever since.

The United States, which had been at the forefront of many other advanced countries, has lagged behind.

And the expansion of the delta variant has caused an increase in cases that is too reminiscent of the repeated waves of last year.

That said, 2021 is not a reissue of 2020. As Aaron Carroll noted Tuesday in

The New York Times,

COVID is now a crisis for the unvaccinated.

Not that vaccinated Americans are without risk, but these are much lower than for those who have not had the vaccine.

What Carroll has not said, but is also true, is that now the covid is largely a crisis of the republican states.

And it's important to bring this up to understand where we are and as a reminder that America's failures in managing the pandemic have had political roots.

More information

• The paradox of partisanship in the pandemic

To be clear, I'm not saying that Republicans are the only ones not getting vaccinated.

It is true that there are clear differences in attitudes towards vaccines, and that, according to a survey, 47% of Republicans said they would probably not get vaccinated, while only 6% of Democrats answered the same.

It is also true that, if we compare American counties, there is a strong inverse correlation between the percentage of votes obtained by Donald Trump in the 2020 elections and the current vaccination rate.

That said, vaccination rates among Blacks and Hispanics remain persistently lower than those of the non-Hispanic white population, a sign that issues like lack of information and trust are also inhibiting our response.

But if we look only at who has not been vaccinated, we leave out what could soon become a crucial element: the danger of covid regrowth depends not only on the number of cases, but also on how geographically concentrated those cases are.

At the time, effective vaccines seemed far off. This in turn made it seem likely that no matter what we did, a high percentage of the population would end up contracting the virus. Before vaccines were available, it seemed that in the long run, the only way to avoid a massive infection was the New Zealand strategy: severe lockdown to reduce cases to a very low level, followed by a test-follow-up regimen -insulation to nip any sprout in the bud. And it was clear that the United States lacked the political will to pursue such a strategy.

With that and all, there were good reasons to impose rules of social distancing and the mandatory use of masks. Even if most of them were infected, it was important that we did not all do it at the same time, because that would cause an overload of the health system. That would cause preventable deaths, not only from covid-19, but also from other diseases that could not be treated if hospitals, and especially intensive care units, were already full.

By the way, this is the logic that always made the claim that the mandatory use of masks and the guidelines on physical distancing constituted attacks on "freedom" made no sense.

Do we believe that people should have the freedom to drive drunk?

No, and not only because by doing so they endanger their life, but even more so because they endanger the lives of others.

The same can be said for refusing to wear a mask last year… and to get vaccinated today.

It turns out that masks and social distancing were better ideas than we thought: they allowed us to buy time until the arrival of vaccines, so that, perhaps, most of us who managed to avoid covid in 2020 and that we are already vaccinated, we never get it.

But there are parts of the United States where large numbers of people have refused to get vaccinated. Those regions appear to be approaching the point we feared in the early phases of the pandemic, with hospitalizations that are saturating the health system. And the dividing line between places that are in crisis and those that are not clearly political. New York has five hospitalized patients for every 100,000 residents; Florida, whose governor, Ron DeSantis, prohibited companies from requiring a vaccination certificate from their customers, 34.

So will covid outbreaks prevent America's long-awaited return to normalcy? In much of the country, no. Yes, vaccination has stalled too soon, even in Democratic states, and residents of those states should be a little more cautious, reverting to, for example, wearing masks indoors (a precaution many Northeast residents never gave up). ). But for the moment, it does not appear that the delta variant is going to prevent the recovery, both socially and economically, from continuing.

However, there are places that really should apply strict measures to buy time as they catch up on vaccinations.

Unfortunately, these are precisely the places that will almost certainly not take such action.

Missouri is experiencing one of the worst outbreaks of covid, but the St. Louis County Council voted Tuesday to eliminate the mandatory use of face masks.

In any case, it is essential to understand that we are not facing a national crisis;

we are facing a crisis of republican states, with clearly political roots.

Paul Krugman

is a Nobel Laureate in Economics.

© The New York Times, 2021. News Clips translation.