BOSTON – Last week, when Dr. Emily Wroe left her home in Boston and drove west to see her parents in Idaho, she watched the signs of the pandemic turn less and less.
After she left Ohio, customers at gas stations no longer wore masks. In Nebraska, when he needed a repair on his truck, the mechanic seemed to look at her oddly because he was carrying one. In Montana, motorcyclists were grouped into groups of 20.
The farther he was from the east coast, the more he discovered that Americans treated the virus threat as “distant and unimportant.”
“It didn’t surprise me, but it’s surprising,” said Dr. Wroe, who spent the spring preparing contact trackers for Massachusetts. “We are in the midst of a global pandemic, and there are many cities and businesses along the way where nothing has changed.”
Six months since the coronavirus crisis was first detected in the United States, the Northeast is in stark contrast to the rest of the nation.
Along the east coast, from Delaware to Maine, new case reports remain well below their April peak. As of Tuesday, five of the country’s nine states with flat or declining case levels are in that northeast corridor.
“It is acting like Europe,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, about the northeastern United States.
Like Europe, the Northeast suffered a devastating wave of illness and death in March and April, and state leaders responded, after some hesitation, with aggressive blockades and large investments in testing and tracking efforts. Residents have largely followed the rules and surprisingly supported tough measures, even at the cost of economic pain.
Dr. Jha said the difference in regional trajectories was so pronounced that, by the time the flu season arrives in late fall, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we have two countries, one with the deep coronavirus.” hospitals overwhelmed, and another part of the country that is struggling a bit, but largely doing well with its economy. “
It is also true that the Northeast continues to be the corner of the United States that has suffered the most from the virus.
New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have reported the highest number of deaths per capita in the country over the course of the pandemic, with more than 61,000 combined. And the economic wounds from prolonged closings run deep: Massachusetts’ unemployment rate in June rose to 17.4 percent, the worst in the country, according to federal data released Friday.
But polls, so far, suggest that voters in the northeast are prepared to tolerate prolonged economic pain to stop the spread of the virus. Governors of the states that were hit at the start of the pandemic have maintained the highest approval ratings in the country.
And in May, when a survey by the University of Suffolk Center for Political Research asked Massachusetts residents how long they could endure the difficulties of a shutdown, 38 percent of respondents answered “indefinitely.”
“This is not an economic policy, it is life or death,” said David Paleologos, director of the center. “That is the core of why people say, ‘I will do whatever it takes.'”
The crisis has generated key regional differences in how Americans view the role of government in their lives, said Wendy J. Schiller, chair of the political science department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said that, with its 400 years The tradition of local and participatory government has been less affected by decades of anti-government rhetoric.
“In New England and the Northeast, it’s easier to say, ‘Put on a mask and let’s close, we’re all in this together, we know each other,'” he said. “It is this reservation of belief that government exists to be good.”
Four months ago, all of New England’s governors were fighting to contain the spread of the virus. They had hesitated to impose closures in early March, when many in the public health community urged immediate action, Dr. Jha said.
“It took longer than it should,” he said.
But the responses were aggressive. Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, decided after a late-night phone call with Jim Yong Kim, co-founder of the nonprofit Partners in Health, to budget $ 55 million for contact search programs they would recruit and they would train a body of 1,900. newly minted public health workers. The program started working in a few weeks.
“I certainly felt under the gun, and I know that many of my colleagues did, to make decisions with less than perfect information,” said Baker.
There was a similar struggle to acquire personal protective equipment, which included renting six flights from China to transport shipments of masks. In early April, Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, transported a million N95 masks from China to Boston Logan International Airport in a team plane.
“There were all kinds of things that happened during this time period that were unusual and risky decisions, but for most of us, we felt like we were doing what we had to do,” said Mr. Baker, whose job approval ratings they rose to 81 percent at the end of June, according to a survey by the University of Suffolk.
In Rhode Island, Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo took a stern approach starting in late March, at one point ordering the State Police to stop cars entering the state from New York to enforce quarantine requirements. She regularly warns that expanding freedoms will be curtailed if residents do not comply with social distancing rules.
Mr. Baker said the high level of compliance with quarantine measures was natural, given how badly the region was mistreated in the spring.
“Like everyone else, I know people who have been directly affected by this,” he said. “I have had very close friends who almost died. I’ve had good friends who have lost family members because of it. I went 100 days without seeing my father because he is 92 years old and is in an assisted living center. “
It is not certain what the next months will hold for the region. A new wave of cases in the south and west has spread to other states, and as of this week, cases increased in 41 states. Among the states where cases increased slightly in recent days are Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.
Dr. Jha said he was optimistic that the northeast states could maintain control over the spread of the virus during the summer, gradually reopening while closely monitoring the changes in the data. “I think they are seeing what is happening in the south and they are horrified,” he said.
Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, a Democrat, sounded cautious. She said officials in her state were “exhaling, but safely, wearing masks.”
“The past few weeks, in particular, have felt good, but we are not out of the woods,” he said.
The coming months will also bring new waves of hardship as the economic impact of spring closings spreads outward, unemployment benefits expire and an expected flood of evictions begins.
Of all the difficult decisions he faced this year, Mills said, none has been more “heartbreaking” than his first order to stay home.
“No one wants to be the governor who puts the kibosh on graduations, weddings, beach parties, bars,” he said. “Nobody wants to be the governor against whom the tourism industry criticizes. No one wants to be that governor. “
Mitch Smith contributed reporting from Chicago.
