Is the United States doing a good job of facing the pandemic? With 1.8 million cases and more than 105,000 deaths, the U.S. is in fact doing worse than practically anyone else, having both more cases and more deaths than any other country. But within the U.S., is Wisconsin doing fine?
As numbers are aggregated, some trends are appearing, showing stark differences between states. While Illinois fought back against sharply increasing cases before reverting the trend and Michigan maintained a steady decrease in new cases, Wisconsin has seen nothing but increases in cases and deaths. What about Milwaukee, then?
I am a French journalist who moved from Paris to Milwaukee a few years back. As such, allow me to do away with the neutral journalistic voice and talk directly to you, the reader. If you’d like, I would like to compare my country and city of adoption with France and Paris.
The U.S. has 330 million inhabitants, almost precisely five time as many as France’s 67 million. Therefore, when we compare France with the U.S. on a nationwide level, we will always multiply or divide by five for the sake of comparison. Paris, on the other hand, has slightly more than twice as many people as Milwaukee County, with 2.1 million Parisians and less than 1 million Milwaukeeans.
The Facts
The United States has 1.8 million reported cases and 105,000 deaths. Wisconsin has more than 18,000 cases and more than 600 deaths. Milwaukee County has more than 8,000 cases and 300 deaths.
Nationwide, France has more than 152,000 cases and nearly 29,000 deaths. Paris alone has more than 8,000 cases and 1,700 deaths.
To perform as well as France did, the U.S. would need a maximum of 760,000 cases and 145,000 deaths. As such, we can note that, while there are significantly more infections in the U.S., relative to the population, America is doing quite well in terms of deaths per capita compared to France. Milwaukee, to perform as well as Paris, would need less than 4,000 cases and 660 deaths. Again, Milwaukee has more cases but significantly fewer fatalities.
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What Explains It?
Why, then, does France, where health care is public and free, have more deaths than America. It is not due to a lack of space in French hospitals—France has six hospital beds for 1,000 people, Wisconsin only has two.
One element that can partially explain it is age. COVID-19 is significantly deadlier for senior citizens. In France, more than 25% of the population is 60 and older. Only 22.3% of Americans are 60 and older. Not only is the French population older, but the virus rampaged in Ehpads (assisted living facilities for the elderly), where its lethality was north of 20%. More than 10,000 French people died of coronavirus in Ehpads, which makes up more than a third of all COVID-related deaths in the country—and most occurred in the first half of April. In the U.S., the government reports less than 26,000 deaths from coronavirus in nursing homes—only half as many as in French Ehpads, relatively speaking.
Another factor is time. France was hit by the virus earlier than the U.S., and thus didn’t have as much time to mount a national defense. On March 15, France had 36 deaths in one day, while the U.S. only reported 6—when it would have needed at least 180 deaths to be doing as bad as France was, which didn’t happen for another 10 days. On March 19, France was reporting 131 deaths. The U.S. didn’t see an equivalent number of deaths in one day until March 31. In general, the U.S. was roughly 10 days behind France when it came to the spread of the virus.
In France, the first half of April was by far the deadliest. On the worst days, France reported nearly 1,500 deaths, which is equivalent to 7,500 deaths in one day in America—which never reached 3,000 deaths in one day, less than half that. That is the key explanation for the relatively high number of coronavirus deaths in France compared to the U.S.: a staggering amount of deaths were concentrated in a two-weeks period, before the country then subsided. On June 1, France only reported 31 deaths. France hasn’t had more than 100 deaths a day since May 20. The U.S., on the other hand, despite a slow start, keeps routinely having more than 1,000 deaths a day, showing only an incremental decrease over the months of April and May.
How France Reacted to COVID
As you can see above, France took a violent hit in April, but the situation got under control within days, while the U.S. struggled to reduce the number of infections and deaths. I believe that the explanation of this phenomenon resides in the political response to the pandemic.
At the end of January, the first few cases of coronavirus were found in France, but the government’s response was slowed because of an internal power struggle: Agnès Buzyn, then-Minister of Health, quit for unrelated reasons just two days after the first known coronavirus death in the country. On February 23, the new Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, launched a plan to limit travel from outside of the country to stop coronavirus before it crossed the French border. At the time, he announced, “Tonight, there is no epidemic in France, but there is a worrying situation on our doorstep.”
It would be nearly another month before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11. The day after WHO announced the pandemic, French President Emmanuel Macron closed the country’s schools and forced non-essential businesses to close. A few days later, on March 17, the French population is confined at home. The government orders that all the hospitals and physicians on French soil be mobilized for a coordinated action. There are only about 100 deaths then, but France is entering its most deadly month. By April 16, when the daily deaths take a dive, 18,000 people have been killed by coronavirus. Since then, new deaths have been trending towards zero.
The measures employed by France to control the situation include the strict enforcement of quarantine. French people needed to fill a form every time they left home and weren’t allowed to travel beyond a radius around their domicile—unless they could prove that they were outdoors for good reasons, French citizens were fined 135€ for failing to comply with the quarantine. To face the economic crisis, the government took it upon itself to pay all laid off employees 70% of their former wages while the employers were mandated to pay the difference, to maintain everyone’s former income. In the industries most heavily impacted by the quarantine, like tourism and restaurant industries, the government paid 100% of the employees’ wages. Coronavirus tests and treatments are entirely free, as it the rest of the French universal health care system. Public hospitals were reorganized so some of them would be entirely dedicated to COVID patients, in order to limit the infections of health workers and pool resources together more efficiently.
As a result, France started gradually reopening on May 11. For a start, quarantine was lifted but French people still couldn’t travel more than 100 kilometers (~60 miles) from their home, and public transportation was reserved to essential workers during rush hours. The reopening strategy proved efficient, as daily deaths kept decreasing to double-digit figures.
In Paris, where the crisis was particularly violent in March and April, saw a steep decrease in cases and deaths throughout the second half of April and all of May. The city averaged 5 deaths of coronavirus per day since May 12, and on May 30, for the first time in months, there were zero deaths in all of Paris.
“We are doing slightly better than what we were hoping to achieve by the end of May,” French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced on May 28. “The news are good, but not good enough to say that everything is back to normal.” He announced that France was entering the second phase of reopening: Work from home and social distancing measures are maintained, but schools and virtually all businesses are allowed to reopen—with the only exceptions being ones that force close contact, like nightclubs. The total reopening of the country, to bring life back to normal, is planned for the third week of June.
How America Reacted to COVID
While France had a coordinated nationwide response, the U.S. simply didn’t. It was left to state and local governments to choose the local response to the crisis. Some states established confinement orders, some didn’t; among the ones who did, the specifics varied wildly from one state and even one city to another.
Iowa, for instance, did not issue a stay-at-home order, and is seeing twice as many cases and deaths per capita as Wisconsin. New York state has 14 times as many deaths and six times as many cases as Wisconsin. It is effectively impossible to analyze the country’s response when there was none, as the U.S. lacked any kind of unified leadership.
In Wisconsin, the first few cases COVID-19 were reported at the end of February. On March 12, Gov. Tony Evers closed schools on the same day France did, but it wasn’t until March 25 that Wisconsin’s safer-at-home order became effective. The first reported COVID-related death in the state happened in Milwaukee on March 19. By then, Paris was reporting dozens of deaths every day, with the first death happening in February.
A series of events then worked against the health of Wisconsinites, starting with election day on April 7, when 400,000 people had to go out and vote in person. Since then, cases steadily increased in Milwaukee County. The new cases on April 7 were low, only 138. Three weeks after the elections, there were 460 new cases in a day. On May 12 and 13, there was another election (for the 7th Congressional District) followed by the 4-3 ruling of the Wisconsin Supreme Court that struck down Gov. Evers’ safer-at-home order. Two weeks after the state was abruptly reopened, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services reported 733 new cases, the largest single-day increase since the pandemic began.
Unlike in France and Paris, cases and deaths in Wisconsin haven’t been trending down, but up. This is worrying, especially as the rest of the world, like Spain and New Zealand, are starting to report days with no COVID-related deaths.
Unlike Spain, New Zealand or indeed France, the U.S. has seen numerous protests to reopen the economy (including in Milwaukee), Americans going out of their way to disobey preventive measures and making a point of not wearing masks like it is a badge of honor. The President of the United States has been repeatedly refusing to wear personal protective equipment and demanding “mask-free” rallies, in direct contradiction of the safety guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And now, more recently, the death of George Floyd, who was killed by the police, sparked widespread protest movements against police brutality, making thousands of Americans go out despite the pandemic. All of these factor into the failure of the American people to contain the viral threat that France has mostly eliminated.
In Conclusion
America is divided. It is divided along class lines; poor people are hit harder, they are more likely to die and they’re taking the brunt of the economic consequences of the pandemic. It is divided along racial lines, as evidenced by the killing of George Floyd and ensuing protests all over the country, including in Milwaukee. It is divided along political lines, and Americans have to risk their lives to vote in person because of a petty Republican-Democrat disagreement, while the president stokes fires all across the nation. It is divided along ideological lines; the virus highlighted that part of the American population is contrarian and will go against their own interests just to oppose anyone that they perceive as an out-group.
A country as divided as the United States cannot mount a coordinated effort against the virus. When Americans have nothing but distrust for their neighbors, then they cannot collaborate for the greater good. As a Frenchman, I find the emotional climate of the U.S. frightening at times, as I watch fellow Americans too busy fighting each other to fight together against a greater threat. I believe that America will be truly great when Americans realize that they don’t have to constantly hate each other.
