A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems
About the author: Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter. He is also the author of Hit Makers and the host of the podcast Plain English.
During the holiday week, I spent a frigid afternoon standing in a long line outside the local library to pick up a rapid COVID test. Lines for essential goods are a pretty good sign of failed public policy. When food runs low, there are bread lines. Where gasoline is in short supply, there are gas lines. But there I stood, nearly two years into a pandemic, shivering inside a depressing metaphor of state failure. As I bounced from foot to foot to stay warm, I asked myself: How on earth did this happen?
America’s miserable—and miserably timed—testing shortage was a policy choice. The FDA has continually slow-walked the approval of rapid tests for development. The Trump administration was utterly uninterested in any COVID policy outside the vaccines. The Biden administration and Democrats didn’t announce bulk orders of rapid tests until the Omicron wave had already swept through the country. Other countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada, approved more kits and prioritized their manufacture and distribution, giving their citizens access to millions of free tests throughout the past year. America lacks the test abundance of the U.K. and Canada because instead of choosing abundance, we chose scarcity.
Zoom out, and you can see that scarcity has been the story of the whole pandemic response. In early 2020, Americans were told to not wear masks, because we apparently didn’t have enough to go around. Last year, Americans were told to not get booster shots, because we apparently didn’t have enough to go around. Today, we’re worried about people using too many COVID tests as cases scream past 700,000 per day, because we apparently don’t have enough to go around.
