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[quote=Anonymous]Other countries are coming back to normal...

[quote][u]How badly is America doing?[/u]

When can schools safely reopen? When will the economy really start recovering? And when will you next eat in a restaurant, go to a movie, watch pro sports or hang out at a friend’s house?

All of these are, in fact, versions of the same question: When will the United States finally start to get the coronavirus under control?

And the answer appears to be: not any time soon.

The U.S. looks ever more like an outlier. Over the weekend, President Trump again played down the coronavirus as a serious threat, falsely claiming 99 percent of cases are harmless. In many places, Americans continued to socialize in proximity, without masks.

Much of the rest of the world is taking a very different approach. It is slowly moving back toward more normal functioning, without setting off major new outbreaks.

Schools in Japan and much of Europe have reopened. Restaurants in Iceland are bustling. The South Korean baseball season is in full swing. Thomas Chatterton Williams, an American writer living in France, asked in a recent Atlantic piece: “Do Americans understand how badly they’re doing?”

The U.S. now ranks with Brazil, Sweden and Peru as having one of the world’s most rapid virus growth rates. (Online, you can find a detailed version of this chart, with lines for more countries.)

There have been two main ways that countries have managed the pandemic successfully. The first approach prevented major outbreaks through an aggressive initial response that included travel restrictions, tests, contact tracing, quarantining and mask wearing. Several Asian countries, like South Korea and Vietnam, followed this model.

The second set of countries, including several in Western Europe, did suffer major outbreaks. But they responded with lockdowns and then began reopening carefully. All of these countries continue to cope with new cases, and will for a long time, but the numbers are small.

The U.S. reacted too slowly to prevent an initial outbreak, and only some regions — like New York — have responded forcefully since then. Much of the country instead declared victory prematurely, leading to the current surge of cases.

Ben Casselman, an economics reporter, has a thoughtful way of explaining the dynamic. “Recent developments raise some real questions about what ‘good news’ even means right now,” he says.

The economy is a central example. Its surprisingly rapid growth in May and early June initially seemed encouraging, Ben points out. But it now seems to have been a sign that Americans were resuming normal activity in ways that spread the virus. Now the virus’s resurgence is causing new shutdowns that will delay a true recovery.

In other virus developments:

--  New data — made available after The New York Times sued the federal government — shows the extent of racial disparities: The contraction rate is almost three times as high for Black Americans as white Americans and more than three times higher among Latinos than whites.

-- Nick Cordero, a 41-year-old Broadway star known for his tough-guy roles in “Bullets Over Broadway,” “Waitress” and “A Bronx Tale,” died after a three-month battle with the virus.

-- Evidence increasingly suggests that the virus lingers in indoor air for extended periods of time. That, in turn, suggests that masks, air ventilation and ultraviolet light are key to slowing its spread.

-- Australia has locked down nine public housing towers in Melbourne to control the virus, telling about 3,000 residents that they must not leave for at least five days.
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