Tomorrow: David Wallace-Wells

COVID’s Arithmetic A single metric might change much of what we know about the pandemic.

Live long enough in a pandemic and you will see the entire narrative landscape shift, even flip, sometimes more than once.

As recently as a month ago, Americans of a certain cast of mind could have still looked to China—and indeed all of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania—with some plausible pandemic envy. Those early lockdowns in Wuhan were brutal, yes; some of the surveillance testing, contact tracing, and quarantine measures imposed in places like South Korea and Singapore were very restrictive, true; closed borders and reentry policies in Australia and New Zealand went further than those of any country in Europe or the Americas; and while the Sinovac vaccines weren’t as effective as those made by Moderna or Pfizer, the success of true “zero covid” policies through the region meant that in many places, shots got into arms without anything like a major covid surge ever having taken place.