On Covid, we're living in two Americas. But media hasn't figured it out.

One America is a lot safer. The other enables recklessness, and politics plays a role. Journalists must make that clear.

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A New York Times story over the Labor Day weekend was headlined, “Covid Deaths Surge Across a Weary America as a Once-Hopeful Summer Ends.”

But are the deaths surging “across America” or in just certain parts of America? And isn’t that important?

The story noted that it’s true that “vaccination rates are ticking upward, and reports of new infections are starting to fall in some hard-hit Southern states.” But, it posited, “Labor Day weekend bears little resemblance to Memorial Day,” when people had high hopes for the summer.

But the piece didn’t convey the experience of millions of Americans for whom this summer actually was a lot better than last summer — and last fall, last winter, and last spring. And that’s because tens of millions of us are vaccinated and living in places where many others around us are vaccinated and where there are vaccine mandates and people mask up in public.

The Times story was filed from Overland Park, Kansas, clearly with the intent of reporting from the middle of the country, and it discussed the pandemic as a national experience.

But Covid-19 is no longer one national experience.

The article reported on outbreaks in Kansas and Arizona (among the unvaccinated, though it wasn’t clearly denoted), sending employees or students back home to engage remotely. And it reported on dire hospital challenges in rural North Dakota.

But New York City was never mentioned. Neither was the San Francisco Bay Area. Or Detroit. Or rural Vermont or New Hampshire. In all of these places Covid-19 is a different reality now, with comparatively lower infection rates and hospitalizations, and higher vaccination rates.

Politico published a similar story over the weekend headlined, “Why We Can’t Turn the Corner on Covid,” which stated, “the deadly surge currently raging in the Southern states may level off, but as the virus recedes in one part of the country, it may explode in another,” noting an “uptick in the Dakotas” and hospital beds beginning to become a concern in Idaho.

But there was no discussion in the lengthy piece about New York, California, New Hampshire or any other state where infections are down and large majorities are vaccinated. I could post a dozen similar stories.

Don’t get me wrong: None of us, anywhere, can let our guard down. We’ve painfully learned that Covid can surge anywhere at any time. But I would argue that’s why things are better in many places. We realize that anything can happen, so we’re more careful and embrace safe social behavior and vaccine mandates.

This isn’t really a North/South or red state/blue state issue. It often plays out along those lines, but there are places in many blue states where things aren’t as good as other places in those same states, and vice versa with regard to red states. New York City has the lowest positivity rate in New York State, for example, while some rural counties in western New York or far upstate have surged with cases.

But just think about that fact for a moment: New York City has the lowest positivity rate in the state and it continues to fall. This city is the largest, most densely populated city in America. How is it possible that it has the lowest positivity rate in the state, with the highly contagious Delta variant dominating, while people in farm country have a higher rate? It’s simple: A much higher percentage of people are vaccinated, and they’re careful, while still socializing and going about their lives.

New Yorkers are out and about as much as people in Florida or Texas, enjoying indoor dining in restaurants, going to shops, heading to the gym, attending entertainment venues. But all of those locations have vaccine mandates, in a city where 78% of adults have at least one vaccine dose, and where most people wear masks in stores even though there is no mask mandate.

Sure, there are mores tests ahead with in-person classes coming back for students — and children under 12 can’t yet get vaccinated, which poses a challenge still — and Broadway shows re-opening. But masks are mandated in schools and in theaters, where there are also vaccine mandates.

People did stop wearing masks indoors in New York for a bit in early summer, until Provincetown and the reports of “breakthrough” cases among the vaccinated. So masks mostly went back on, and more careful socializing ensued.

The city, like everywhere, saw a rise in cases at that time, as I wrote about then, but hospitalizations and deaths didn’t follow at the same rate. And that was because people were vaccinated and also soon shifted their behavior. The summertime hospitalizations and deaths — a lagging indicator, still showing a slight increase — have almost exclusively been among the unvaccinated.

And it now turns out, as the science comes in, that breakthrough cases aren’t as common as some media portrayed them, and that vaccinated people who experience a breakthrough not only are highly unlikely to have serious illness or die; they’re much less infectious — maybe not infectious at all — than previously thought, and certainly not as infectious as the unvaccinated.

Even some of the news outlets running the dramatic, less-nuanced stories about the pandemic actually have articles tucked away that point out these emerging facts — yes, like The New York Times. David Leonhardt, in his Morning Newsletter in the Times, explained that recent studies show that your chances of having a breakthrough infection are 1 in 5000, maybe in even 1 in 10,000:

In reality, the risks of getting any version of the virus remain small for the vaccinated, and the risks of getting badly sick remain minuscule….

…That risk is so close to zero that the human mind can’t easily process it. My best attempt is to say that the Covid risks for most vaccinated people are of the same order of magnitude as risks that people unthinkingly accept every day, like riding in a vehicle.

Tara-Parker Pope, reporting in the Times and citing studies out of Singapore, noted “many experts believe the risk of getting infected from a vaccinated person [experiencing a breakthrough case] is still relatively low.”

These stories about the vaccinated and their risks — and how they can operate and are operating within their environments right now — are, however, compartmentalized. They’re not woven into the larger reporting on the pandemic. That’s a problem for at least two important reasons.

The vaccinated — and the unvaccinated who are most persuadable — need to see the rewards of being vaccinated, and shouldn’t be scared with shock headlines into believing there is no hope. And perhaps more importantly, the places with highly vaccinated populations and vaccine mandates, where people are respecting one another while still shopping and socializing, should be held up.

And the reporting on the exploding rise in cases, hospitalizations and deaths in other places should not only focus on the direct tie to low vaccination rates; they must also be tied to public policy of the politicians in those states.

The political stories about mask mandate battles and bans on vaccine mandates are being reported. But, like the stories on breakthrough, they’re separated out. They’re not integrated into the larger stories about the pandemic’s surge on a national level and why it’s happening. Instead, we’re told of national numbers and a collective experience that no longer holds.

Recklessness is being enabled in most places that are surging, but that fact is downplayed in these broad overview stories, seemingly in an attempt not to assign blame.

The reporting isn’t holding governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida or Greg Abbott of Texas — nor the millions of unvaccinated people following conspiracy theories about vaccines while promoting unproven, dangerous treatments — responsible for the pandemic’s longevity and the impact on other people’s lives. This isn’t objective reporting, as some of the reporters and editors might argue; it is omitting pertinent facts and analysis.

The two Americas of Covid are real, with very different experiences. One is a positive way to move forward, and the other is continued disaster. That must be part of every report now.

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