ANALYSIS: Four months that will decide America's future

The darkest hour for America is still to come, experts say. What we do next is key. If Americans do not change their behavior quickly, experts warn, the weeks and months ahead will be filled with more death and despair, packed hospitals and unemployment lines. Daniel Arkin NBCNews

How was a microscopic virus able to bring the world’s richest and most powerful country to its knees?

Americans might have expected that their country would marshal its tremendous financial and intellectual resources, and its technological might, to fend off Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Instead, it has been crippled for the better part of a year, and is now heading into a winter that one of its top doctors said could be the gravest public health crisis in its history. Ten months after the first Covid-19 death in the United States, the country is hurtling toward an appalling milestone: 300,000 deaths out of more than 15 million confirmed cases.

Yes, vaccines are coming, and the first vaccinations may begin next week. But their cumulative effect on the nation’s health will not be felt until well into 2021. If Americans do not change their behavior quickly, experts warn, the weeks and months ahead will be filled with more death and despair, packed hospitals and unemployment lines, and further political polarization and alienation.

The time to change our path is now.

“We have to act like everybody we come into contact with has Covid, and we are going to have to make the kind of sacrifices beyond what we were asked to make in March and April,” said Dr. Kavita Patel, a primary care physician in Washington who is a scholar at the Brookings Institution.

“It’s going to get worse unless we are willing to literally make severe restrictions of our own movement,” Patel added. “I’m not just saying cancel your air tickets, I’m talking about not having people over or going to somebody’s house for Christmas and Hanukkah.” ...

The story of what went wrong this year has no coherent arc or single villain, and the final act remains unwritten. The general consensus among public health experts, however, is clear enough: The U.S. failed to stop the virus before it spun out of control...

But the deficiencies of the Trump administration’s policy actions and rhetoric only partly explain the country’s tragic ordeal during the last 10 months. The root causes run deeper — and the dysfunction is more far-reaching than any one presidency. ...