You call me the “Silent Killer.” True enough, I’ve done in almost 90,000 of you. Also murdered a big chunk of your GDP. But today I won’t be silent.
America, you ought to be ashamed of how you’ve been fighting me. I’m going to challenge you to do better—and now tell you how.
Why the friendly advice?
I enjoy the sport of our struggle. I thought I might now even up the match a little, for the next time around. And believe me—there will be a next time.
So where to begin?
First, forget the blame Olympics. Your people are in a raging but unproductive argument about who’s been most at fault for my destruction: Trump’s leadership, Obama’s poor preparations, Chinese malice. Forget the rear view mirror.
Think Differently
Instead, look now in your own mirror—and confront your democratic identity. You’re a big, complicated self-governing society—fundamentally vulnerable to my kind of attack. Your nation is open, diverse, and regionally differentiated. You love liberty in speech and action. You thrive on debate about what to do in a crisis. Compared to places like Germany and China, your complex and freedom-loving culture makes my job a whole lot easier.
Face your real strategic problem: you aren’t playing to your democracy’s strengths. Winners leverage what they do best, and mitigate the rest. Take a hint: up your game, by changing how you play it.
Five Tips
1.Depoliticize your processes of detection and action—but not too much.
You didn’t catch onto me at first, though experts warned you. You weren’t paying attention, you weren’t prepared: not enough science to understand me, nor testing to track my spread. And you still haven’t gotten serious about that. Fast and stealthy, I continue to do plenty of needless killing.
Meanwhile, you’ve made yourselves even more vulnerable—turning me into a political football. As the clock ticks, I continue to get thrown around by different factions, arguing how big a deal I might be, and whose fault is that.
America: democracy means politics—but there are two kinds. Good politics is deliberating and debating a crisis, and what to do about it. People argue, but at their best, come to better answers together.Alas, bad politics is also part of democracy. As when elected leaders drive short-term personal agendas, selfishly bypassing the common good. They downplay risk to avoid telling citizens fearsome news, or about painful solutions a crisis requires. They kick the can down the road—to get reelected before the storm hits.
How to fix that? Because we viruses can wreak such havoc, you’ve got to re-balance how your experts and elected leaders work together, to guide your people how to defend against me.
First, shore up the independence of your experts, so they can report unbiased data, and truth-tell publicly without fear of reprisal. They must be free to recommend best science and best practice. Perhaps you should re-charter your CDC (or create a dedicated pandemic advisory board) as a standalone institution: more like the Federal Reserve than a cabinet department.But don’t turn those experts into sacrosanct priests: sometimes they get it wrong. You must demand that they advise transparently, about levels of certainty, and the risks and rewards of potential courses of action. They don’t mandate policy, but work with elected leaders to help develop the best trade-offs for the nation. And there will always be trade-offs.
Good politics is part of the process: expert recommendations balanced by citizen voices—subject to debate and challenge, and accountable to civic judgment. Your elected leaders set final policy—but they too must be subject to debate and challenge, accountable to citizens. All parties must answer: how well do the solutions proposed support the long-term common good? What risks and sacrifices are we willing to endure together for that?
2. Worry less about your leaders, more about your citizens. In your hospital ERs and local communities, I hear longing for better leadership: “Where is our next FDR, to steer us through this crisis?”
Hope all you like: democracies always have leaders both good and bad. Ain’t gonna change.
Shift your focus towards the real democratic power: your citizens. Invest in the people who will choose your democratic leaders, and work with them to build nationwide pandemic defense.
Start at the bottom and ensure their basic needs—food, shelter and healthcare. My destruction falls most heavily on your poor, who disproportionately work your critical front-line jobs—and are dying at higher rates. And don’t think that today’s government relief will be enough to stem the social inequality now shredding your democratic fabric. You have to fix that too.
Next, build your citizens’ pandemic awareness—engage them honestly about what must be done to halt me (I grudgingly admire Governor Cuomo’s daily briefings).
Longer term, improve your education system. Too many of your children lack the scientific proficiency to fight future pandemic wars. Too many are ignorant of your nation’s history, and its traditions of sacrifice, empathy, and volunteerism. Build these capabilities to strengthen your future citizens’ defense.
3. Develop an integrated public health system. You have world-class hospitals, medical schools, pharmaceutical companies and research institutes. Thanks to their innovation competence, you’re now accelerating development of therapies and vaccines against me.
But I still have a big edge. Because your open, market-based society fragments the relationships among all the many players who must seamlessly work together to deliver civic health. Researchers and hospitals are under-connected with your primary care and community facilities. Add in your upside-down-incentivized insurance providers, vulnerable supply chains for equipment and medicines—so easily do I slip in and through the patchwork of it all!
For all your pathogen foes, you need a fully-integrated, more collaborative system that harnesses all assets smoothly, continuously learning and taking action to curb every new pandemic threat.
4. Renew the advantages of your federalism.
Your federalist system, a great asset of your democracy, has lost its way. Its complementary roles and responsibilities once enabled you to be both big and small: Feds handle big investment, standard-setting, specialized assistance; states, closer to communities, provide citizen-facing services, tailored implementation of standards, customized local practices.
But now, lucky me, the system is breaking down: confusion and conflict about sourcing and allocating critical supplies; turf battles about decision-making; persisting arguments about relief funding.
Some more friendly advice: first, revisit and clarify who does what for pandemics like me. Second, take better advantage of all the experiments in your “laboratory of democracy ” that the dual system provides. If some states want to roar back to work, accepting the risks of higher death rates, stop carping and observe what really happens. Study also lessons of states who move more slowly. Dramatically expand testing, so you can honestly assess the benefits, costs, and what works and doesn’t work—and manage relaxing or tightening social distancing as data unfolds. And get yourselves on the same page about the key metrics of success—you still seem confused about all the different data being collected and evaluated about my campaign against you—especially how to measure the right balance between stopping my curse and rebuilding your livelihoods.
BTW, while you’re at it: why not pass a law banishing from all civic discourse the phrase “I told you so?”
5. Don’t miss the opportunity of this crisis—to prepare for the next one. Anytime some national disaster hits, my human hosts vow to fix mistakes and do better in preventing and managing next time around. But inevitably, all is quickly forgotten. Will this crisis be different for you?
Well, I’m skeptical. But let me finish by spooking you to reach for a higher standard.
You may end up beating me, but other deadly pathogens will darken your future. And some will be even more lethal than Covid-19. Because, unlike me, they won’t be accidental. They will be engineered by malicious human foes.
Foreign enemies have been inspired by your clumsy struggle with me. They see that America the Great is now surprisingly vulnerable to a pandemic. They will soon enough come after you—with weaponized mutations. Trust me, pal: build up your democratic strength now—or say goodbye to your lovely and ornery land of the free.
Originally published on Forbes.com