Comparing Canadian and US Responses to COVID-19

Canada and the United States have much in common, so why is the COVID-19 pandemic so much worse in the US? That's the subject of this article from vox.com. As I noted in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, the US has about 2.5 times the number of cases and deaths per capita compared to Canada.

The article describes many reasons for this; as you might expect, the key ones are the differences between health care systems in the two countries and the more coordinated response of the federal government in Canada.

The Canadian response hasn't been perfect. The spread of COVID-19 into indigenous communities, homeless shelters, long term care facilities and seniors residences, for example, is a national disgrace.

But overall, we are doing far better than the US.

But at this point in the crisis, the worst you can say about the Canadian response is that it has been basically competent — what you would expect from a country with a functioning political and health care system. The United States, by contrast, hasn’t cleared this lowest of bars. Our lack of attention to public health, poorly designed national health care system, and deep political dysfunction have contributed to the greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes.

The United States could have been in a similar situation as Canada. We have the world’s largest economy and its finest academic institutions; the Canadians show us that, had our political leadership marshaled these resources in the right ways and at the right times, some significant numbers of American lives would likely have been saved.

That’s not what happened. We now have every reason to believe that our broken political system is quite literally deadly.