I’d like to tell you a story about the pandemic, one that may sound so gauzily hopeful, it would qualify today as a public health fairy tale. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war. But at the state and local levels, for many months, red and blue authorities moved in quite close parallel. For the most part, red and blue people did, too. Over the next few weeks, inspired by this book and a few other efforts at pandemic autopsy, I’ll examine the experience of 2020 and how it is already distorted in our memory.

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Persons: Covid Organizations: PublicAffairs Locations: United States