The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

Without the test kits, contact tracing was stymied; without contact tracing, there was no obstacle in the contagion’s path. America never had enough reliable tests, with results available within two days, distributed across the nation. By contrast, South Korea, thanks to universal health insurance and lessons learned from a 2015 outbreak of MERS, provided free, rapid testing and invested heavily in contact tracing, which was instrumental in shutting down chains of infection. By the end of 2020, the country would record some 50,000 cases in total; the U.S. was reporting more than four times that number every day. The first two chances to curb the spread had already been lost. The third would presently appear.