...the gap between what experts projected a few weeks ago and what they are projecting now is absolutely astounding, and it is primarily a reflection of just how much has been done, and how quickly, to defend against and respond to the coronavirus. In many cases, we have achieved so much more than modelers even imagined possible that the range of outcomes we are now looking at did not even appear at the very low end of initial forecasts. The models weren’t “wrong,” exactly, they seemingly just underestimated how widespread, thorough, and steadily maintained social-distancing measures could be. How could they not? It can be easy to forget, a few weeks into something like a hemisphere-wide lockdown, just how absolutely unprecedented this public-health mobilization truly is: nearly every American in every state embracing punishing, restrictive quarantine-like isolation for the sake of the country as a whole. We are doing so willingly, with hardly any meaningful resistance to shelter-in-place guidance, even though the statistical profile of the disease, while brutal, would allow most Americans to think it was a much more significant threat to others (the case fatality rate here now estimated between 2 and 3 percent). This is solidarity I simply didn’t believe was possible in this country anymore and under any circumstances, and it has arrived in the space of just weeks, in the midst of national political chaos with tribal partisanship still boiling at a feverish peak. It is breathtaking.
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