Puerto Rico Is Taming Covid-19 By Applying Force, Reducing Friction
In the worldwide race to end the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States has not only struggled to keep pace with other countries but also failed to learn from their successes.
2021-11-15 20:23:16 - VI News Staff
Early on, U.S. officials and health agencies lagged the stepwise testing efforts of Japan. As the disease spread in summer 2020, Americans resisted lockdowns and quarantine enforcements, quickly falling behind countries like New Zealand with its effective “go hard, go early” scheme. The U.S. then lost step with South Korea in terms of contact-tracing and was swiftly passed by Canada in air-travel safety measures. Now, compared to other high-income Western nations, the United States is dead last in vaccinating the public while leading the world in two unfortunate metrics: total cases and deaths.
If globally minded Americans weren’t already embarrassed by the nation’s poor pandemic performance, an announcement from the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs in late October brought our continental Covid-19 failure into clear view. The OIA reported that the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the U.S. island territory located 1,000 miles south of Florida, is out-vaccinating all 50 states.
Even the Democrat-dense New England states, which pride themselves on their well-funded health systems and progressive politics, are running several percentage points behind Puerto Rico. Latest figures indicate the island has administered more than 155,000 doses per 100,000 people. Additionally, 90% of eligible Puerto Rican youth are fully vaccinated compared to only 50% of teenagers in the U.S. mainland. Even more impressive is that Puerto Rico has become a global leader in preventing new cases. Its positive case rate is hovering around 2%, second only to New Zealand.
Doing as the Puerto Ricans do
To achieve its 74% full-vacation rate, the island’s political leaders and public health officials have (1) applied force when needed and where effective and (2) made it incredibly easy for citizens to get vaccinated.
As mainland Americans sit on a massive surplus of vaccine doses—and with the death count now exceeding 760,000—there are important lessons to learn from Puerto Rico’s two-pronged approach. For starters, U.S. leaders should acquire a second prong.
Embedded in the Americans ethos is a belief that most problems can be solved with force. And when that doesn’t work, the instinct is to apply more force, forgetting that another option exists. Instead of trying to beat Covid-19 by applying force (and force alone), mainland Americans should do as the Puerto Ricans have done, and look for opportunities to reduce friction.
By force and by friction theory
On a recent episode of the Hidden Brian podcast, Northwestern University professor Loran Nordgren brought this friction-reduction theory to life with the story of a furniture chain in Chicago.
As Nordgren tells it, the company makes fully customizable sofas and chairs. And shoppers were known to spend hours in the showroom or online designing their perfect seating arrangements. But they hardly ever bought. At first, the retailer assumed customers needed more prodding: lower prices, louder ads or pushier salespeople. But Nordgren’s colleague at the Kellogg School of Management, David Schonthal, quickly discovered the real problem. People weren’t buying these new sofas because they didn’t know what do to with their old ones. And with that insight, the company launched a sofa pickup program, which sent sales through the roof.
The moral of the story: Pushing harder works, sometimes, but for optimal results it helps to figure out (and address) what’s holding people back.
Reducing friction to boost vaccinations
For months, Puerto Rico pushed its citizens hard, enforcing some of the U.S.’s harshest pandemic restrictions. Government measures included nonessential-business closures, stay-at-home orders, strict mask mandates and an air-tight curfew that lasted over a year.
But in addition to using force, Puerto Rican leaders have also applied a gentler touch to increase vaccination rates. Here are two approaches that have worked well. If the entire Unites States emulated these efforts, we could boost vaccination rates and, finally, get ahead of the pandemic:
1. Facilitate vaccinations
Puerto Rico’s vaccination efforts have been filled with logistical difficulties from the jump. The island’s hospitals continue to experience frequent power outages four years after Hurricane Maria while citizens struggle with an island-wide poverty rate of 43.5% (nearly four times higher than the mainland average of 11.8%). Moreover, with a population of 3.2 million spread out over 3,515 square miles, it hasn’t been easy for Puerto Ricans to travel to large, centralized vaccination centers as people do in most states.