Pro-Life New England Controlling Coronavirus by Acting Like Europe and Lincoln

Last week I posted a map from The Daily Yonder showing that rural counties in New England are containing coronavirus more effectively than South Dakota or any other part of the nation. The reason for that public health success is obvious: folks on the top half of the East Coast are acting like Europe and taking coronavirus seriously:

“It’s acting like Europe,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said of the Northeastern United States.

Like Europe, the Northeast suffered a devastating wave of illnesses and deaths in March and April, and state leaders responded, after some hesitation, with aggressive lockdowns and big investments in testing and tracing efforts. Residents have largely followed rules and been surprisingly supportive of tough measures, even at the cost of economic pain [Ellen Barry, “U.S. Northeast, Pummeled in the Spring, Now Stands Out in Virus Control,” New York Times, 2020.07.22].

Instead of looking at the pandemic primarily through an economic lens, our Northeastern neighbors are demonstrating they are the real pro-life states:

But polls, so far, suggest that voters in the Northeast are prepared to tolerate prolonged economic pain in order to stop the spread of the virus. Governors from the states that were hit early in the pandemic have sustained the highest approval ratings in the country.

And in May, when a poll by Suffolk University Political Research Center asked Massachusetts residents how long they could endure the hardships of a shutdown, 38 percent of those surveyed answered “indefinitely.”

“This isn’t an economic policy, this is life or death,” said David Paleologos, the center’s director. “That is at the core of why people are saying, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes’” [Barry, 2020.07.22].

New Englanders also seem to have better memories of Abraham Lincoln’s correct formulation that government really is of the people, by the people, and for the people:

The crisis has drawn out key regional differences in how Americans view the role of government in their lives, said Wendy J. Schiller, chair of the political science department at Brown University in Providence, R.I. The Northeast, she said, with its 400-year tradition of localized, participatory government, has been less affected by decades of antigovernment rhetoric.

“In New England and the Northeast, it is easier to say, ‘Let’s put on a mask and lock down, we’re all in this together, we know each other,’” she said. “It’s this reservoir of belief that the government exists to be good” [Barry, 2020.07.22].

Beating coronavirus requires faith in government and community action. It requires recognizing that, far from acting in complete isolation and independence, we live and breathe in a shared social context in which we all depend on each other to do the right things and surrender certain fractions of our autonomy and convenience to support a necessary greater good. Start from that value proposition, recognizing interdependence and responsibility, and you get better public health. Start from a different value proposition, and your only hope against coronavirus is to live in some poorer community where people and jobs and opportunities are few and far between.