To Win the Battle Against Coronavirus Make America Kind Again
As a Canadian I try not to obsess about what’s happening in America, but sometimes it’s hard to disengage with the swirling vortex of decadence and doom just across the border. Especially when you’re a population health policymaker with one of Canada’s provincial health authorities.
Canadians aren’t that much different than Americans in many ways, in fact we’ve become more American over the years thanks to the flow of U.S. multimedia into Canada. But one way in which our differences seem to stand out right now is in how our two countries have responded to the Coronavirus pandemic.
One country has a well-established single-payer universal healthcare system, the other does not. One put in place a national framework to respond to pandemics after SARS in 2008[1] and one dismantled the closest thing it had to that in 2018[2]. To an American, the stereotypical Canadian is polite and apologetic to a fault, while the stereotypical American revels in being unapologetically free do whatever the fuck they want. Because Liberty, and the Constitution or something. These are just a few admittedly oversimplified and generalized differences.
We could explore all of the many ways in which the two countries are different bureaucratically or culturally, but I want to focus on a simple and powerful trait that I believe is one of the most under-appreciated resources in the fight against COVID-19.
Kindness.
What is kindness? And why does it matter so much in times like these?
Kindness involves things like respect, gentleness, consideration, empathy. Our kind selves are the selves who follow the calling of the better angels of our nature, to quote President Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address.
Here in British Columbia, just north of Washington State, our Provincial Health Officer (“The Top Doctor”) has signed off on her updates to the public with the phrase “Be kind, be calm, and be safe” for months now, putting kindness at the front of our minds week after week in the battle against COVID-19.
While it may be easy to dismiss it as just words of encouragement, I want you to appreciate how the most senior public health official in the province reminds five million British Columbians every week to be kind as the first of three qualities she deems important enough to warrant ongoing emphasis.
It is not nothing.
Kindness, as an expression of social capital, is a powerful resource in the fight against this disease, just as it is in a community’s response to an earthquake, hurricane, flood or other type of disaster. Social capital being defined as “the effective functioning of social groups through interpersonal relationships, a shared sense of identity, a shared understanding, shared norms, shared values, trust, cooperation and reciprocity.”[3]
The America that Canadians like me have seen on the news these past few months has not appeared to excel in these qualities, and while I know there is much kindness in the United States of America we haven’t seen much of it in the news up here.
The America we’ve been watching, with horror, has not appeared to function effectively.
Interpersonal relationships have appeared paranoid and combative, embodied by such images as the St. Louis couple waving their guns at protestors.[4]
It’s hard to discern any shared identity other than this is a country whose people is in constant conflict with each other, often violent, even spiteful. A country where the phrase “I can’t breath” was turned in mere weeks from a call to justice in the face of systemic racism and disproportionate violence towards black people at the hands of a militarized national police force, to the rallying cry of white people incredulous at the prospect of having to wear a mask in public to prevent the spread of a deadly virus.
On that note, there appears to be no shared sense of understanding about the virus or about the public health measures necessary to combat it, with half of Americans believing in Medical Conspiracy Theories[5], such things as COVID-19 originating in a Chinese military lab or it being caused by 5G cellphone towers.
There appears to be no sense of shared norms as fights break out between those who choose to wear a mask in public or practice physical distancing and those who refuse to.[6] Taking on biblical scales of importance, speakers even berated elected officials in Florida for mandating use of masks in public spaces as “following the devil’s laws” and suggested that the masks themselves were both deadly and an abomination that interfered with God’s intended natural use of human airways.
Following their own line of reasoning, if those people lived up here in Canada (Or a dozen other U.S. states just north of them) their fingers would fall off from frostbite in the winter if they refused the government’s call to wear gloves.
Fed a steady diet of completely different realities from major news stations and a million bias re-enforcing websites there appears to be no sense of shared values, trust, cooperation and reciprocity, as America seems at war with itself over how to respond to the pandemic, let alone why it should at all.
People can blame Trump all they like but the failure to stop this virus from overrunning the country is bigger than him, he is a symptom of what has become an increasingly unkind nation.
A nation that is unkind to itself.
It’s an understatement to say that right now America is not doing great. The moment when America needed a kind president it got a cruel one, and through the glow of our television sets and computer screens Canadians have watched in grief and bewilderment as America has become sicker and sicker.
To be clear, Canada is full of assholes too, some of whom protest batshit crazy stuff in the streets, hurl racist abuse at people of Asian descent or others, and who blithely refuse to abide by public health orders; but as is usually the case, it appears that America has ‘gone big’ with this trend.
As I’ve written before, pandemics are a type of disaster that we have more agency to shape the outcome of than many others, yet pandemics play out longer, and are spread out further, placing different kinds of strains on resources, including people’s patience. Pandemic fatigue has now clearly set in, in the United States and in Canada, but while the curve is remaining low here, it is racing back up with a vengeance in America.
British Columbia was one of the first jurisdictions in North America to see COVID-19 infections, in January of 2020. As such, it was also one of the first jurisdictions in the world outside of China to develop testing, which it began doing several weeks earlier than American States who suffered confusion and poor communication with federal agencies. The CDC eventually distributed a faulty test kit to states that set mass testing back even further.
Having a strong start or a poor start to testing and putting in place public health measures made all the difference in where jurisdictions are now in their efforts to restart economies and maintain a functioning healthcare system. The rest however, has been up to the public. Will they match the efforts of public servants and the medical community or flagrantly undermine them?
In short, will they be kind, or will they be selfish?
Today, BC’s rate of infection is below 2% and only a handful of its five million people are in hospital with COVID-19. Meanwhile several U.S. states, including Washington State which is just a short bike ride away from my home, continue to see double digit infection rates. Arizona is currently seeing a staggering infection rate of 24% with Florida and Texas in the mid-teens.[7]
America’s growing rate of infection is spun by some politicos as some kind of triumphant demonstration of its “world-class” testing rate, but compared alongside other countries in the world it sits just between the global powerhouses of Chile and Belarus.[8]
As a Canadian who is deeply concerned for my American friends and family, who is pained to see a country with unparalleled resources flounder under an unparalleled lack of cohesion, I encourage everyone to embrace the old adage that a little bit of kindness goes a long way.
I don’t care if people think I’m being smug in writing these words because the situation is so dire in the U.S. that I feel we just need to be brutally frank. Canada is going to fight to keep its border closed to the U.S. as long as it is a total shit show down there, just as the Europe is going to continue to ban Americans from entering its borders. Both jurisdictions have now placed the Scarlet Letter on Americans, and when you look at the respective epidemiological curves it’s no mystery why.
Not every Canadian is overly apologetic, polite and mild mannered, just as not every American is an unapologetic libertarian conspiracy theorist. Yet these stereotypes communicate a certain truth about how Canada (or European countries) and the United States have culturally and politically understood the concept of freedom. As Umair Haque summarized so tangibly in his piece “How Freedom Became Free-dumb in America” this understanding of the concept of freedom is the difference between Canadians and Europeans having universal healthcare and Americans having open carry gun laws.
Instead of purposefully spitting and coughing on babies, waving guns in each-others’ faces, accusing elected officials of being satanic pawns for introducing public health measures, breaking out into bar fights over masks and distancing, marching into State Legislature buildings with machine guns to intimidate lawmakers, vilifying Asian Americans for the “Wuhan Virus” or “Kung-Flu”, having college infection parties to purposefully spread the virus or uploading videos of yourselves spitting on and licking groceries to contaminate them, I hope Americans will consider being kind, being calm, and being safe instead.
Are Canadians kinder than Americans by nature? No, I don’t believe we are, and in fact recent studies prove it. I’ve been to America many times, I’ve experienced its kindness just as I’ve witnessed cruelty and idiocy at home in Canada. But when it has come to fighting this pandemic an important message has resonated here in Canada, unlocking this powerful medicine that is readily available, has no side effects and costs nothing to use in the fight against COVID-19.
Be kind, be careful, be safe. It’s a comforting battle cry. I hope it catches on in America.
[1] Executive Summary: Leaning from SARS: Renewal of public health in Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/learning-sars-renewal-public-health-canada/executive-summary.html#agency
[2] Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised, Deb Riechmann, Associated Press, March 14, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/trump-disbanded-nsc-pandemic-unit-experts-praised-69594177
[3] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EWJ7L6O91c
[5] Half Of Americans Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories, NPR, March 14, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/03/19/291405689/half-of-americans-believe-in-medical-conspiracy-theories
[6] Brawl breaks out in Arkansas restaurant over lack of social distancing, Hunter Hoagland, WREG News, Little Rock, https://wreg.com/news/newsfeed-now/brawl-breaks-out-in-little-rock-restaurant-over-lack-of-social-distancing/
[7] Where COVID-19 is spreading fastest as U.S. cases rise 46% in past week, June 30, 2020, Chris Canipe and Lisa Shumaker, Reuters, Financial Post. https://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/where-covid-19-is-spreading-fastest-as-u-s-cases-rise-46-in-past-week
[8] Testing and Data: Coronavirus, Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing