COVID WARS

Olsen reviews the United States’ management of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The author, an engineer and “volunteer activist by avocation,” scrupulously documents the trajectory of Covid-19’s march across the U.S. He focuses on Ravalli County, Montana, his own home, described as a “microcosm of what many communities in America have gone through.” Through this compilation of essays, interviews, and conversations, Olsen explores a diverse cross-section of perspectives regarding the government’s response to the outbreak—both liberal and conservative, satisfied or deeply discontented. The author covers the pandemic with an impressively encyclopedic thoroughness—the scientific defensibility of masks, the moral character of Anthony Fauci, the protests conducted by Black Lives Matter, and many other issues related to the crisis are painstakingly considered. At the heart of the book is a consideration of two principal subjects: the competence of the government’s response to a deadly virus and the societal response to a terrifying emergency. Unfortunately, the author argues, rational discourse was largely replaced by reflexive partisanship and manipulative demagoguery. (“Fear and anxiety are starting to drive the rhetoric, personal decisions, and sometimes even the science. Fear is a good thing amid imminent danger. But, fear of what-has-not-happened-yet is soul-crushing—we call it anxiety.”) Per Olsen, America’s management of the Covid-19 threat was riddled by a “cascade of mistakes, egos, and errors”; in the final analysis offered in this astute history, the U.S. fared poorly, an especially sad outcome since the nation’s unspectacular performance was largely avoidable. Olsen’s study is delightfully eclectic—out of this assemblage of writings emerges a genuinely vivid tableau of American opinion, expert and amateur. The author is admirably undogmatic—he respectfully takes any position offered intelligibly and in good faith seriously and provides an empirically rigorous accounting of the issues. This is a deeply satisfying book—analytically relentless, nonpartisan, and appropriately curious about the opinions of the scientific and political elite as well as those of everyday Americans.

An informative tour of the Covid-19 years.