The New Yorker article, “To Fight the Coronavirus, You Need an Army”, and the NPR Podcast “Hotel Corona” both offer outsiders a glimpse of how a city, one domestic and another thousands of miles away, handle the COVID-19 crisis. 

For Huston, TX, a medical city with ample spaces and medical supplies, the biggest challenge was a lack of trained nurses and respiratory therapists. With the practice of social distancing and mask-wearing, Texans were able to curb the disease from spreading gradually until July. Yet the positive trend ended July 4th, when large groups celebrated the holiday with relaxed safety measures. Moreover, Texas’ Governor, Greg Abbott, issued a reopening order in May, until a surge in cases forced the plan to end prematurely. While it seems that Texans do not have a consensus on what individuals responsibilities in this crisis entail, the medical community has been  working collectively to outrace the virus, improving their ability and capacity to offer better care for patients through staffing changes and treatment protocol optimization.  

As Albert Camus put it, “The only means of fighting a plague is “common decency.” Though healthcare professionals can help save lives through high quality care and politicians can slow the spread by issuing executive orders, the most fundamental and effective way to battle a highly infectious disease is for individuals to be good citizens and each do their part, both for the sake of themselves and for people around them. America is a country established on the basis of freedom and independence, and while it is true that efforts to fight COVID-19 should not be used as a pretext for repression, it is critical to acknowledge the civil responsibilities as an individual living in a society. Holding on to these two ideologies too tightly and ignoring the best practices supported by facts can lead to a downward spiral during a global crisis, when communal action is called for; this downward spiral may eventually end up eroding the premise of these ideologies: a safe, healthy, and functioning society. 

For any society marked with heterogeneity, clashes are almost inevitable, and the COVID-19 crisis certainly escalated tensions in the U.S., with each group holding onto their beliefs tighter than ever. Though this progression of situation was expected, Hotel Corona in Jerusalem, where Jewish and Arabic patients were housed under the same roof, offered us a possible alternative. Guests of the hotel ended up enjoying meals and stand-up comedy together, participating in Zumba classes, and learning about each other’s lives and traditions. Suffering from the same disease and being isolated in the same facility reduced the psychological and physical distance of the individuals, and reminded them of their common identity as humans. Hotel Corona was an unintentional social experiment that could shed light on ways to promote unity in heterogeneous societies during time of crisis: when reminded of shared experiences, emotions, and identities, people are more likely to view each other as another vulnerable human being rather than an enemy or alien; this change in perspective will, hopefully, induce compassionate empathy and common decency necessary to battle a pandemic.