How Wearing a Face Mask Became a Political Statement in the U.S.

If a world leader in science and technology can’t convince its citizenry to wear face masks amid a raging pandemic, that’s a problem.

Such is the reality that America faces as a highly transmissible virus runs riot ahead of Independence Day celebrations. With the nation setting ever higher one-day records for infections, which topped 50,000 for the first time on Wednesday, public health experts worry that not enough Americans grasp the risks — or worse, view the crisis through a political lens in an election cycle.

“What type of dystopian situation are we in, when a face mask is a political statement,” said Cameron Wolfe, an infectious-disease doctor and associate professor of medicine at Duke University. “We have got to get woken up to the fact that this isn’t going away.”

A country that’s turned out more Nobel laureates than any other, led development of the first polio vaccine and, yes, put a man on the moon is now a coronavirus superpower. The U.S. is home to the highest number of Covid-19 cases — 2.6 million and counting — and most deaths, at more than 127,000.

The floundering U.S. response has caused a heat blast of criticism directed at the Trump administration. Yet the pandemic also casts an unflattering light on deeper American maladies — politicized science, information bubbles and inequality — decades in the making that have made the country especially vulnerable.

Worldwide, the reopening of major economies in recent weeks has relied on an honor system. There’s a built-in assumption that enough citizens will be well-informed and take precautions — wearing masks, washing hands, social distancing — to prevent community spread of the virus. No country has been perfect. But the U.S. has been off-the-charts bad by any reasonable reading of the data.

While Covid-19 cases have plateaued and sloped downward in industrialized economies in Europe and Asia, the U.S. is still clocking in at record levels of new infections and accounts for 25% of global fatalities. Promising treatments are emerging, yet an effective vaccine is still months away, if not longer.

If the virus is not contained soon, a new surge of infections in Sun Belt states like Florida, Texas, Arizona and California could push up the daily tally to as high as 100,000, warned Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease fighter, in a Senate hearing this week.

“What we’re seeing over the last several days is a spike in cases that are well beyond the worst spikes that we’ve seen,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a BBC radio interview Thursday. “That is not good news. We’ve got to get that under control or we risk an even greater outbreak in the United States.”

Videos of jam-packed bars and nightclubs from Arizona to Michigan and political rallies in Oklahoma have alarmed public health experts. Respiratory droplets traveling into the air after a person sneezes, talks or raises their voice are considered a primary transmission route.

Because U.S. lockdowns were less consistently applied than those in Europe, they were also less effective, Fauci told the BBC. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, renewed his call for masks and social distancing at the Senate hearing.

The pandemic has been a moving target for states facing different degrees of vulnerability and reopening strategies. This July 4th will be more subdued in some places, with beaches closed in Miami and events like Chicago’s lake-front fireworks display and a Beach Boys concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles canceled.

America’s moment of ineptitude has placed President Donald Trump, whose poll numbers have crumbled in recent weeks, in serious political peril. Some 72% of Americans said the administration wasn’t prepared to deal with the novel coronavirus that emerged in China late last year, according to a CBS News survey released this week.

Nor has there been unified messaging from top science advisers and the president, who has predicted the virus would vanish without a vaccine and mused about questionable treatments, ranging from the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to bleach.

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