In February and early March, America’s political and business leaders began to face a crisis of potentially catastrophic proportions. Many failed the test.
As the coronavirus crisis emerged, the president dithered and downplayed, promising a magical end to a problem he did not appear to understand. The mayor of New York reveled in unscientific happy talk, assuring his citizens that life would remain normal. And many in the pundit class, including yours truly, got the earliest calls disastrously wrong.
This is the story we know — a story of institutional failure, of chaos and incoordination, a tragedy that has seemed to unmake the most powerful country in the world.
Yet failure is not the entire account of America’s response to the coronavirus. Because while politicians in Washington, D.C., fumbled the federal role, Washington State was closing restaurants and bars. While New York City slow-walked, the San Francisco Bay Area, and then the rest of California, was ordering its residents to “shelter in place.” And as the Republican president offered meaningless bromides, two Republican governors, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Larry Hogan of Maryland, were among those leading the nation’s first statewide school closures.
There are many reasons different parts of the country have experienced such different outbreaks — urban density, air pollution and many other variables.
Still, bold, early pushes for social distancing appear to have paid off immensely. The Bay Area, where I live, reported some of the first “community spread” coronavirus cases in the country. Now the region is leading the nation in “flattening the curve.”
Ohio, too, has begun to see signs of success. And in Washington State, where an early outbreak at a Seattle-area nursing home left dozens dead, cases have tapered off so quickly that the state is now returning hospital ventilators to the nation’s stockpile.
Over the last few days, I reached out to Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California; Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington; and Mike DeWine, Ohio’s Republican governor. I also spoke to London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, and Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, one of the first large companies to direct its employees to work from home.
I asked them all a simple question: How did you get the coronavirus so right so early, when so many other leaders missed the boat?
Here’s what we can all learn from their success.
They heeded clear warnings.
You can’t respond to a crisis if you don’t recognize the crisis. This sounds obvious, but it was an unusual superpower for the leaders who moved quickly: They kept their eyes open. They were lucky enough to get an early peek at the disaster, and they were wise enough to take the warning seriously.
Sometimes the signs were unmissable — Microsoft had insight into the virus because of its extensive operations in China, Smith told me.
But other indicators were murkier. For Newsom, the first hint of trouble was repatriation — in January, the federal government began bringing back Americans from affected areas of China, many to military bases in California. Newsom told me that working on the issue got him and the state’s other top officials thinking seriously about what was to come. The repatriations, Newsom said, “underscored a sense of curiosity and significance that this crisis is about to hit our state.”
They trusted the experts.
Again, obvious, and again, so rare: These leaders understood the limits of their own knowledge, and when faced with tough choices, they deferred to the experts.
“I didn’t do very well in school in science,” DeWine told me. But after a long career in politics — DeWine has served in the U.S. House and Senate, and was elected to the governor’s office in 2018 — he’d learned to recognize the value of expertise.
“When I’ve made decisions that I’ve regretted,” DeWine said, it was often because “I didn’t have enough facts, I didn’t ask enough questions, I didn’t ask the right people.”
Last year, DeWine appointed Amy Acton, a well-regarded physician and public health academic, as the director of the Ohio Department of Health. As the virus approached, Acton alerted him to the threat posed by the Arnold Sports Festival, a bodybuilding gathering founded by Arnold Schwarzenegger that had been scheduled to take place in Columbus in early March.
“We looked at all the facts, and we came to the conclusion that it did not make any sense to have 60,000 spectators come into Columbus for four days,” DeWine said. Canceling the event was a huge move — few gatherings had been shut down anywhere in the country, and the economic impact was in the tens of millions. Festival organizers resisted the decision, and Ohio got a court order to shut down the event.
“That was, frankly, a very gut-wrenching decision,” DeWine said. “But we made that decision based on the evidence.”
They moved forcefully but incrementally.
All these leaders understood that slowing the virus required asking people to make huge disruptions to their lives — to stop everything, stay inside, to forget about school and work. They knew they couldn’t ask it all at once; they would have to prepare the public, over weeks, for a new reality.
“Part of what I tried to do from the very beginning,” Breed told me, “is to reassure the public that, look, it’s just a matter of time.” Though it might be easier to tell people that there was nothing much to worry about, that wouldn’t help anyone in the long run. “I wanted people to start to get ready, because it’s going to hit San Francisco, and it’s going to impact our city in a significant way,” she said.
The strength of local institutions also played an important role — in places that moved early, business leaders, municipal governments and state governments had established years of coordination that proved pivotal.
“We had the benefit of enlightened business and community leaders,” Inslee said, referring to Microsoft and other large Seattle-area companies.
Smith, of Microsoft, echoed this sentiment: “Too often, people in the tech sector think that they can find the answer to anything, because they’ve been smart and successful — and I thought it was of fundamental importance that we not think that we’re as smart as the experts, and so we turned to the public health experts in King County and listened to them on Day 1.”
In that vein, there was something else very unusual in the places that moved first, too — actual bipartisanship. DeWine worked with Ohio’s biggest cities, many run by Democrats, to impose social distancing; Inslee and Newsom had to consult with many Republican officials.
“It’s the science of the lifeboat,” Inslee told me. “When you’re all in the same lifeboat, there just isn’t room. When you’re in the middle of a storm, you got to keep the lifeboat afloat.”
This planet of ours is a lifeboat, too, and vast parts of it are growing uninhabitable. To fix it, we’ll have to learn from the leaders who are curious enough to recognize the coming dangers, and brave enough to take them on.
Office Hours With Farhad Manjoo
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