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Since the spread of COVID-19 launched a global pandemic in 2020, over half a million Americans have been killed by the virus. And experts agree that the death and infection rates have been much worse in the West\u2014mainly the United States and Europe\u2014than many other places in the East. In other words, while other countries like China, Cambodia and New Zealand were able to temper the spread, the U.S. had its ass handed back to it. There are a lot of reasons for this, says David Wallace-Wells, New York magazine writer and author of How the West Lost COVID. Factors like population age and geographic location played a role in these places\u2019 ability to control the virus, but ultimately, one of the most \u201ccatastrophic\u201d factors that played into the death roll, is something we very much had control over. And that is how our leaders responded and our collective culture, on both a federal and local level. \u201cI think the toll of the disease really throughout all of Europe and all of the Americas shows you just how devastating cultural and political inaction is,\u201d he said. \u201cSouth Korea looked at what was happening in January. And they said, \u2018Holy, this is really bad. Like if China is locking down an entire city of 10 or 11 million people for a period of months, like this must be really scary and we should get our act together in response.\u2019 And in the West, we just didn't.\u201d Host Molly Jong-Fast is adamant that having a person who wasn\u2019t inept in office, aka someone other than Trump, would have made a huge difference in saving lives. Wallace-Wells agrees. He also thinks even the Democratic leaders and bipartisan health officials dropped the ball, too, though, at least in the beginning. \u201cGavin Newsome, Andrew Cuomo, and even Anthony Fauci, all of them were sort of saying to some degree the same thing, which was, \u2018we don't want to disrupt things too dramatically unless we need to,\u201d and that cost lives. \u201cOur wealth, our medical capacity, our cultural capacity was gonna prevent us from being vulnerable in the way that these other countries elsewhere in the world were vulnerable,\u201d he added. It\u2019s also a scary indicator of Americans\u2019 lack of ability to take immediate action if it\u2019s uncomfortable for future crises, like climate change Molly points out. But there is some good news: \u201cI think the cultural lesson of this pandemic is [that] we under reacted and it's likely that we're going to be much more aggressive in the future.\u201d

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