I did not leave the US because I was afraid of catching it. I did not leave the US to go back to my friends and family. I did not leave the US because I suspected places might remain closed until the end of my visa. I did think all these things. But they are not the true reason for which I left the US. I left because I knew there would be a disaster in this country.

We knew from mid-to-late February that the virus was definitely coming, and we were preparing ourselves for the possibility of schools closing and the need to start working from home. When I became sick with an infection in late February, I was able to witness first-hand how the health services were preparing for a wave of sick people, just as I could see on social media how France was telling its population to self-isolate if they were experiencing symptoms or knew somebody who was, and to call their doctors instead of going to the ER and risking mass contamination. Still, at that point the virus still seemed like a disturbance rather than the source of a worldwide crisis, and I remained excited for the months I still had to spend in the US, enthusiastically planning new trips and visits.

I started suspecting that things were going to get bad a little before mid-March. By then, my social media newsfeeds has begun to be flooded with information and videos from Italy, a lot of them consisting in warnings for other countries. They were telling us how they were painfully learning that the virus was much more dangerous than we initially thought, back when it only affected Asian countries and rare tourists; that it was much worse than the flu and that it wasn’t only the elderly who was dying, though they did constitute the majority of the victims. At this point, the situation in France was slowly escalating into a national crisis as more and more people were getting sick (with not too many dying yet, still) and the government started changing their discourse. Day after day, they started introducing new restrictions, banning large gatherings, cancelling cultural events and asking people to limit their travels. All the while reassuring us that we did not need masks (of course, the truth was that we didn’t have any) and that there was no need for schools or places like Disneyland Paris to close.

I think that, paradoxically, it was the US ban on European travelers that gave me a first signal that something huge and unprecedented was brewing. When my father had first mentioned it, about a month earlier, I was utterly convinced that it was impossible, that the US would never do such a thing, that globalization was too big to be stopped. It would not take long for me to understand how mistaken I had been. Two days later, OUSD was finally closing all of their schools (at first only for a few weeks), days after San Francisco and Berkeley had made the same decision.

Then, as I watched the wave wash over Europe, and European leaders taking unprecedented measures, I started realizing just how bad it would be. From then on, lockdown made total sense to me and I resolved to comply with all these necessary restrictions. When Macron gave his “we are at war” speech, I knew that his tone was appropriate. I had finally stopped underestimating Covid-19. But, unfortunately, the same could not have been said for many Californians and Americans around me. They didn’t know their country would be hit harder than it had ever been since 1929, or maybe ever. They did not know that it was already too late to avoid a tragedy.

There were several factors that made me realize a little earlier than others (but probably way later than experts) that the US would be hit differently than other Western countries. Some of them have to do with current politics, of course, but some are also deeply engrained in the American culture and its policies (or lack thereof), for which we could not really blame the current administration.

First, as I mentioned it previously, I had one advantage over most Americans, and it resided in the fact that I was not American. This fact, which would not have mattered all that much in other circumstances, meant that I had a vantage point. One that had to do with social media and the way they work. Because my social media accounts are considered “French” – based in France, where I usually live – because I follow a lot of French or European media and people, because most of my online friends are French or European, most of what I saw on my social media newsfeeds could not have been seen by Americans. Instead of watching mostly CNN or Fox News reports – which had a lot to do with the primaries at that point – or reading from my relatives in such or such American state, most of what I was seeing related to the epidemic and its devastating effects on Europe. I was seeing warnings from this friend met in Oxford who now lived in Italy, I was seeing French celebrities and officials get sick one by one, I was seeing dozens of videos of health workers begging people to stay at home in order to save lives. I had a pretty accurate picture of what was going on in Europe and of the virus itself. And there was no reason why the US would not suffer the same fate, in fact it was already on the way. I was witnessing the future of the United States, and I was one of the rare people to do so at the time. Apart from a certain degree of denial, the American public remained largely unaware of the European situation.

This is not the only reason why many Americans did not see it coming. As of early 2020, the United States was, as many other Western democracies, in a state of extreme political polarization. Before Donald Trump’s 2016 election, but even more so after, bipartisanship and cross-parties cooperation had given way to a culture of staunch partisanship. I strongly believe that social media and their mechanisms that exacerbate both political opinions and division between opposing camps are to blame here. People used to believe we could build bridges, and now they want to build walls. They used to think democracy meant that a plurality of opinions was enriching, and now people are being “canceled”. There were consensuses, now there are facts and alternative facts. Everybody, and I the first, is willing to bend facts to their opinions and beliefs, instead of doing the opposite. In many situations, while we used to adhere to political parties and politicians according to the policies they advocated, it is now our adherence to a party, or at least our rejection of a party, which shapes and indicates how we feel about the world. This is not helping.

Because allegiance and personal feelings have started to matter more than consensual truths and expertise, because experts have now become, maybe sometimes rightfully so, the embodiment of a self-serving elite who cannot relate to the daily concerns of the common people, distrust and defiance against the media and scientists is greater than ever. They’re not the repository of knowledge and method that they used to be. They have become fallible oligarchs hiding their incompetence behind their degrees; at worst, collaborators, and at best, sellouts. Trump said that experts were “terrible”. But who should you turn to then? Self-declared, unproven experts, like him? Your gut-feeling? God? Twitter?

Of course, there is one critical factor I haven’t mentioned yet. Had this crisis taken place pretty much any other year, things would not have gotten that bad. But 2020 is a special year for Trump. It is the year of his only possible reelection – as of the current Constitution at least, you never know what can happen with this guy.

With his reelection on the line, both Trump – and Republicans – and Democrats are de facto acting and communicating strategically, with the goal of winning the majority of votes in November. Some may find this cynical, but it is how politics work, and it is the smart thing to do. Trump’s reelection campaign strategy revolved around the good economic health of the country and its historically low unemployment rate (basically the idea that he would have indeed made America “great again”, though how critical his policies were to this result remains arguable). However, all of this has been swept away by the Coronavirus. Instead, Trump finds himself with a historically high unemployment rate of over 20%, an issue which has forced him to resort to radical measures: stimulus checks. He thus loses one point of criticism over Democrats (notably Biden and Sanders): who’s the socialist now?

What this means is that it is in Trump’s interests to diminish the gravity of the crisis, to pretend that everything is fine and that he’s doing a great job (that also has to do with his egomania), and to reopen the country as quickly as possible in order to try and cut his losses. Hence the delusional Easter reopening. On the other hand, it is in the Democrats’ interests to exaggerate the reality of the crisis, and even to take advantage of the chaotic economic situation in order to show the necessity of “safety net” policies for which they have been advocating for years. The virus, and any analysis of Trump’s handling (or mishandling) of the crisis has therefore become a political argument. In such a context, is anybody even approaching some kind of objective speech?

Some people have called the Coronavirus crisis the new divide of American politics, to be loosely modelled on the preexisting divides between pro-Trumpers and anti-Trumpers, and Republicans and Democrats. The difference is that this last group may be more united than ever in this crisis, while the Trump camp may face defections.

It is mostly for this reason that Trump initially dismissed reports on the upcoming crisis and tried to shift the blame on others (among which China, Europe, the World Health Organization, the states and the Obama administration); only to change his tune when even he, the Denier-of-Proven-Facts-in-Chief, could not deny the reality of the crisis any longer. Of course, this comes as highly unsurprising, since, as CNN’s Chris Cillizza puts it, “What Trump is doing now is what he always does about everything: Attempting to rewrite history so that it looks like he was always the smartest guy in the room, the one person who saw this all coming from a mile away.” This translates into increasingly ridiculous White House briefings that showcase his mythomania more than ever and find him bragging about his disastrous response to the crisis and his unprecedented ratings. He has even adopted Emmanuel Macron’s military lexical field. Anything goes when it comes to avoiding losing face: unsubstantiated accusations, false reassurances, miraculous cures such as a more clement weather or chloroquine… All Trump is really sending is wrong signals.

Unsurprisingly, Faux Fox News has, once more, sided with Trump. Like him, they started by calling the pandemic a “Democratic hoax”, pointing the finger at China and Europe, and turning to the now usual claim that “the flu kills more people every year”. Now that the situation has become impossible to ignore, they’ve started inviting celebrity “doctors” like Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz to say crazy things live, such as comparing the virus to AIDS (that you can only get from someone’s blood) or car crashes and drownings (it’s true that these are highly contagious…). Of course, if that is what you call experts, it makes sense to question their competence. Such fallacious comparisons are served with the usual grossly exaggerated or undermined facts, a good chunk of various conspiracy theories, and outright imaginary figures. It’ll remain broke ‘cause they ain’t gonna fix it.

You put all these things together and what do you get?

A population more confused and divided than ever, who have no idea who and what to believe and what will really happen to them. Some people are in outright denial, some are panicking, some are deluding themselves in thinking that things are going to be okay, some are doing business as usual because they don’t have a choice… Apart from conspiracy theories (one of my friends thought it was simply deaths from the flu and that people were overreacting) some people are even actively counteracting measures and not taking social distancing seriously, which will only delay the end of the crisis and its impact.

If you add this state of extreme political polarization and misinformation to the complexity of levels of government in the United States, you end up with a patchwork of local responses to the crisis, which in the end prevents a coherent national strategy. Cities, counties and states are each coming up with their own measures, trying to balance the factors of health recommendations, economic needs and public approval, all the while adapting to their own local specificities.

It is too easy to put the blame of governors though. It was the federal government’s job to design this strategy and it is only Trump’s unwillingness to take responsibility that has led to local governments filling the void with what they thought would be better (for some) or blind loyalty to Trump and faith in market and religion (for others). Under the guise of supporting state rights, Trump is, as usual, shifting the blame in case of bad news. To summarize: if things get better, it will be thanks to his administration; if things get worse, state governments will be to blame. Overweight-and-totally-not-obese Trump doesn’t care about the real world, he’ll have his cake and eat it too. Apart from Trump’s egomania (what else is new?), the resulting patchwork of responses means that the crisis will be drawn out, probably even more than it would already have been in this continent-sized country. What we are seeing is only the beginning.

I remain unconvinced, however, that things would have been drastically better under the precedent administration. Sure, President Obama would have taken things more seriously and shown the responsibility of the highly competent leader that he is. But this level of partisanship is not completely new to the Trump era, at least on the side of the Republicans. Considering that President Obama faced an unprecedented amount of hate and dubiously justified criticism from them, it is easy to imagine that a measure such as a federal stay-at-home order would have been met with much hostility and defiance. People would have accused him of acting like a dictator and suspicions of a conspiracy (the famous “Democratic hoax”) would have been rampant. Then, how would the Obama administration have faced calls to reopen the country?

Nonetheless, President Obama would have acted with dignity and dutifulness, two qualities foreign to Trump. There would not have been any outright lies or coddling, no self-congratulatory statements, but plainly stated facts and hard, sobering truth. Unlike Trump, Obama would have cared more about the well-being of American people than about his popularity or his reelection.

But most of all, the problem resides with the American society itself. You cannot change a whole country in a matter of weeks, and the best measures would only amount to a patch on a long-running blowout. This doesn’t have much to do with Obama or Trump. The truth is that the American way is failing and needs to be thoroughly remodeled, without which it will meet its end. It’s time to put a little equality in all that freedom.

In many ways, the richest country in the world looks like a third-world country. The lack of safety net has kept a huge part of the population in poverty, or on the verge of poverty, for decades. No other developed country has so many retired people forced keep working in order to eat or so many illegals occupying key jobs in industries (especially the food industry) while retaining a precarious status. An unofficial socio-economic segregation has kept African-Americans in dire situations, with little prospect of improvement. And it’s not getting any better, with or without the virus. Inequalities are rising and the wealth gap has never been so big, never has there been such a big homeless population in places like San Francisco or Los Angeles. And now, with the unemployment rate skyrocketing, more and more people will find themselves dependent on food banks, or losing their home, or unable to borrow money and to get healthcare.

Healthcare access has historically been a problem, and it will only get worse as people lose their insurances along with their jobs. And even those who do have an insurance are in no way guaranteed a cheap – let alone free – care. The system is well-established, and everything has been designed to make the patient pay as much as possible and make the insurance and the hospital as rich as possible. These people with little to no coverage have been discouraged from taking care of their health for years. This has made them chronically fragile and they will be the first ones to die. Not to mention the rates of obesity and diabetes (among which, probably, Trump himself). Everywhere I look, all I can see is a health disaster. And it’s even risible when one looks at the amount of money being injected in the health industry every year. I don’t know where it goes, but I know that nurses in New York had to wear trash bags to work and that nobody seems to have enough tests.

And then, I remember that, in this country, people are allowed to carry rifles as a constitutional right. And that the notion of a popular upheaval against an autocratic power that does not defend the interests of the people is culturally valued. And that a lot of people are bound to get angry in the next few months, for a lot of reasons…

This is why I left.

The Coronavirus did not wreck America. America wrecked itself. The crisis only precipitated a tragedy that was coming anyway. It did not so much worsen the wealth gap in the country as it revealed it, in all its ugliness. What will happen to these people, those who will survive only to find themselves bankrupts? And what will become of this country, once so glorious and powerful? I cannot help but think of Renaud’s line: « Ce pays que j’aimais tellement, serait-il/finalement colosse aux pieds d’argile ? »

This leaves me with a lot of interrogations: What is freedom? What are its costs? What is democracy worth when confusion, misinformation and lack of education seem to pervert its principles?

But, most of all, these observations leave me with a bitter taste, one that truly makes me sick. So many deaths that could have been avoided, so many more to come…

To be continued…