American exceptionalism or American Arrogance. History Essay

I am glad some students bringing about this issue: many countries are doing better in the crisis, and why don’t we learn from them?
In the early stages of this pandemic, I witnessed a perfect demonstration of American exceptionalism, which means that we are the best, we know better, we have the best practice and those misfortunes in foreign countries just wouldn’t happen here. This is not just the Trump administration. Instead, it is a wide-spread cultural attitude.
The cultural attitude is very serious business. You don’t have to care about politics. But culture attitude, and the advice you incline to listen to, shape your behavior, which in the time of crisis, could mean life and death.
Take an example. Should we wear a mask when we go out in Boston? On this issue, we don’t have to take Trump’s words seriously. But we do take the words from our medical authorities, such as CDC and Surgeon General Jerome Adams, very seriously, because they are non-political and represent the best of American professionalism.
However, all of the advice we have received from them is about not wearing mask.
"Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and a public face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, on CBS’ “60 Minutes” earlier this month.
"You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider," Surgeon General Jerome Adams said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” earlier this month.
They have given us the reasons. First, if everyone wears mask, it will create a shortage so the medical personnel who really needs them will not have it. Second, only a sick person needs to wear and healthy person should not. Third, the Asians have a cultural tradition of wearing mask and we are not Asians. Forth, wearing mask often makes you to touch your face more often, increasing the risk to get the virus.
Of course, each individual expert should have his or her professional judgement, which may vary from each other. What surprised me is that, on this issue, all experts, media, and government agent spoke with one voice without any other alternative opinions.
Let’s take a close look.
We all know that the airway is one of the most common routes for transmission of respiratory viruses. Wearing a mask is supposed to be a non-brainer solution to stop it. When I lived in Japan with my family 20 years ago, I watched a graphic demonstration of how a mask works on TV by a Japanese doctor, according to whom, in most cases, about 90% of virus can be stopped by a simply mask.
The advice from American authorities also accidently revealed the truth. For example, the US Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted in late February -- in all caps -- "STOP BUYING MASKS!" The reason? "They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk."
If the masks are not effective, why it becomes so critical for healthcare providers to get them?
The claim that the only sick people need mask is also ridiculous. First, we don’t know who is sick and who is not. And experts all acknowledged that the transmission of coronavirus often starts from people without any symptom. Second, a mask prevents virus from both coming out of sick person’s mouth and getting into a healthy person’s airway. Why don’t we use this double defense.
The only reasonable explanation is a technical problem: wearing mask makes you touch your face more often, increasing the risk of infection. If it is true, the medical authority should educate people how to handle mask. In fact, we put our mask on when we are indoor, with our hands clean. If we have to adjust our mask when we are outside, we can touch the mask itself rather than our face.
The most damaging reason is culture. So far, we have a lot of reports about how Asians were under attack. The cultural theory of mask-wearing only enhanced this stereotype of Asians. For example, right at our school, as in many schools across America, at the beginning of the semester, many Chinese students came to classroom wearing mask. Some of them were under attack. Our president rightly issued a message to Suffolk community, urging people to be respectful to those wearing mask for a cultural reason. At the same time, she repeated the CDC guideline of not wearing mask.
But it is not a cultural reason. Those Chinese students who came back from China in early January, at the peak of the outbreak. They were all supposed to be quarantined but Americans did not take this issue seriously. They were wearing mask out of their responsibility to the others. The Chinese media and social media urged those Chinese who went abroad, without knowing if they themselves carried the virus, to wear mask to protect the others. They condemned those who did not do so as selfish and irresponsible. Unfortunately, as I observed, those Chinese students who wore mask felt a lot of social pressure here. By the third week, I hardly saw any of them wearing a mask, probably because it was beyond the 14 days of quarantine time, probably because they did not want to be yelled at.
The truth is not Asian obsession of mask. It is that they have been educated by a different science. We are talking about a large East Asian community whose population is larger than us, enjoys a higher life expectancy, and has handled the current crisis better than us. Some European countries started to follow their practice. We Americans increasingly act alone.
Cut and paste several passages from the media:
The current federal guidance against wearing masks is at odds with that issued in many other parts of the world, such as the Czech Republic, Beijing and Shanghai, where mask use has been mandated for anyone going out in public. A number of East Asian societies, where mask use is widespread — such as South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore — have reported lower levels of infection than the U.S. has, despite being closer to the source of the outbreak in Wuhan, China. In Taiwan, where reported levels of infection are also relatively low, authorities have called for people to use face masks whenever they are in enclosed spaces, such as public transportation.
Some Western authorities and public health experts have also begun calling for more widespread use of face masks. On Monday, the government of Austria mandated the use of face masks for anyone entering a supermarket.
Days earlier, the German Medical Association, that country’s umbrella organization for doctors, issued new guidance on Thursday urging citizens to find a simple fabric mask or make one themselves, and to wear it in public — while forgoing medical-grade masks.
A group of mostly UK researchers, publishing in the Lancet, a top peer-reviewed medical journal, on March 20, recommended that "vulnerable populations, such as older adults and those with underlying medical conditions, should wear face masks if available. Universal use of face masks could be considered if supplies permit."
Writing last month, Adrien Burch, an expert in microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that "despite hearing that face masks 'don't work,' you probably haven't seen any strong evidence to support that claim. That's because it doesn't exist."

In fact, there is evidence of the exact opposite: that masks help prevent viral infections like the current pandemic.

Burch pointed to a Cochrane Review -- a systemic analysis of published studies on a given topic -- which found strong evidence during the 2003 SARS epidemic in support of wearing masks. One study of community transmission in Beijing found that "consistently wearing a mask in public was associated with a 70% reduction in the risk of catching SARS."

SARS, like Covid-19, is a respiratory illnesses caused by the same family of viruses called coronavirus.

While SARS spread around the world, the worst of the epidemic was focused in Asia, particularly mainland China and Hong Kong. The legacy of this experience could be seen early on in the current pandemic, as news of a virus spreading led people across the region to don face masks to protect themselves.

From the beginning, Hong Kong and many other Asian governments have recommended people wear masks in public, whether they are showing virus symptoms or not.

Despite eye-rolling in some parts of the Western press, and talk of Asia's "obsession" with face masks, the tactic appears to have contributed in helping to stem the outbreak.

Taiwan, South Korea and mainland China, all places with widespread mask use, have seen greater success in preventing major outbreaks or reigning them in once they begin than in Europe and North America where masks are either not used or hard to come by.
Speaking to CNN, Ivan Hung, an infectious diseases specialist at the Hong Kong University School of Medicine, said that "if you look at the data in Hong Kong, wearing a mask is probably the most important thing in terms of infection control."

"And it not only brings down the cases of coronaviruses, it also brings down the influenza," he said. "In fact, this is now the influenza season, and we hardly see any influenza cases. And that is because the masks actually protected not only against coronaviruses but also against the influenza viruses as well."

At the beginning of March, Hong Kong had only around 150 cases of the virus, despite being on the frontlines of the pandemic since it began and not instituting many of the more draconian population controls seen elsewhere. The city has only seen a spike recently after people began returning to the city from Europe and the US.

"Based on the research, face masks are much more likely to help than to hurt," according to Burch. "Even if it's just a homemade cloth mask, if you wear it correctly and avoid touching it, the science suggests that it won't hurt you and will most likely reduce your exposure to the virus."

Three months have passed and the major American medical authorities still believe that they are the one who know the best.

I also want to re-post another student’s comment:
“The countries that are closer to China location wise, like South Korea, Japan, Singapore have succeeding in flattening the curve with mass testing, quick and effective results and strong cultural norms around obedience. I have a cousin who was recently in Seoul, South Korea and resides in Germany, she told me that the moment she landed in Seoul her temperature was taken and she was told to download an app by the Korean Ministry of Health so she can track if she develops any symptoms and so that she can be told if any passengers developed the virus so she can get tested, mind you she is not a citizen shes a tourist. The app also informed her if anyone around her in the location she was staying was tested positive, it also gave her information on nearest testing centers and a medical hot line she could call if she was experiencing symptoms. During her stay in SK her temperature was taken at random locations and she wasn't allowed to walk around without a mask on. These are all preventive methods that the South Korean government took to flatten the curve and they've succeeded in doing so. She also told me that the moment she landed back in Germany, no one took her temperature, no one asked if she had any symptoms, literally no measures were being taken. European countries and the US alike that are always belittling East Asian countries are not as great as they like to say they are.”
A wonder observation.
How long will it take for our Americans to learn from the others?
Even China, a bad model for America, a totalitarian regime, provides some valuable lesson if we want to learn. I paste a few passages from the Wall Street Journal:
U. S. and European leaders are looking at China’s progress in curbing the coronavirus pandemic to guide them on how to beat the virus within their own borders.
They may be drawing the wrong lessons, doctors and health experts say.
The cordon sanitaire that began around Wuhan and two nearby cities on Jan. 23 helped slow the virus’s transmission to other parts of China, but didn’t really stop it in Wuhan itself, these experts say. Instead, the virus kept spreading among family members in homes, in large part because hospitals were too overwhelmed to handle all the patients, according to doctors and patients there.
What really turned the tide in Wuhan was a shift after Feb. 2 to a more aggressive and systematic quarantine regime whereby suspected or mild cases—and even healthy close contacts of confirmed cases—were sent to makeshift hospitals and temporary quarantine centers.
The tactics required turning hundreds of hotels, schools and other places into quarantine centers, as well as building two new hospitals and creating 14 temporary ones in public buildings. It also underscored the importance of coronavirus testing capacity, which local authorities say was expanded from 200 tests a day in late January to 7,000 daily by mid-February.
The steps went beyond what’s envisioned in many hard-hit Western cities. As a result, many doctors and experts say the recent lockdowns in the U.S. and Europe may slow the rise in new infections—if properly enforced—but still won’t be enough to stop it or prevent many hospitals from being overwhelmed, as they were initially in Wuhan.
“A lot of the lessons have been lost,” said Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “A lockdown helps buy time: The only way it will work is if you actually backtrack and start figuring out who has the virus.”
The U.S., Britain and some European countries will ultimately, like Wuhan, have to establish multiple makeshift hospitals and quarantine centers to isolate more cases if they are to bring the virus under control, she said.
“Absent of divine intervention, I don’t think there’s any other way out of it,” she said. “We’re heading in that direction: We’re just doing it too slow.”
……
Paul Krugman, a Nobel Price laureate of economics that I mention in another post, raises his frustration:
“I still sometimes encounter people convinced that America has the world’s highest life expectancy. After all, aren’t we the world’s greatest nation? In fact, we have the lowest life expectancy among advanced countries, and the gap has been steadily widening for decades.”
We have been told again and again that we are the greatest nation on earth. But the reality speaks louder than the rhetoric.