The US is starting to look like Italy on coronavirus lockdown. It could learn a thing or two
Analysis by Angela Dewan, CNN
(CNN)And so it begins. In the United States, schools are starting to close, overseas travel is restricted and even Mickey Mouse has had to hang up his little white gloves — Disneyland, too, is off limits.Italy’s struggle with the biggest and deadliest coronavirus outbreak outside of China serves as a warning to the rest of the world that we, too, could be faced with a brutal uphill battle.US President Donald Trump initially brushed off coronavirus fears as alarmist and erroneously conflated the deadliness of the flu with that of the new virus.
America is shutting itself downBut Friday, Trump called a national emergency, forced to accept that the United States won’t be immune this time.The US now has a reported 48 deaths and more than 2,100 infections, and it’s beginning to look a lot like Italy on lockdown.Now the US government has some quick and uncomfortable choices to make that could shape the health of the country in weeks from now. Many of these choices drive at the heart of what it means to be American.Individual freedoms that many Americans hold onto so dearly will need to be compromised. Freedom of movement, to assemble and protest, and the right to privacy could be among liberties first to go in the battle to control the virus. The sense of exceptionalism that is so engrained in the American psyche will have to be put aside. This is not a war that can be won by the world’s most powerful military or bought by the world’s biggest economy.
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