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There was no reading between the lines when US President Donald Trump fronted the White House press briefing in September.
"If you take the blue states out," he declared, gesturing to a graph of projected coronavirus fatalities, "we're at a level that I don't think anybody in the world would be at".
It was, in some ways, an ominous prediction.
With more than 240,000 deaths and in excess of 10 million confirmed cases, the United States has indeed reached a level experienced by no other nation — and for all the wrong reasons.
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In just one week, while all eyes were fixed on the presidential election, new daily coronavirus cases jumped to more than 140,000, an all-time high.
And with almost every metric trending in the wrong direction, it is yet to be seen what bearing new leadership will have on the crisis, or if the nation is able to overcome political fault lines to find a way forward.
The blue vs red narrative
While the US may be united by name, its response to the global pandemic has been anything but.
The "blue versus red" narrative surrounding the outbreak was a regular fixture throughout the election campaign — one both sides of the political divide have sought to capitalise on.
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Just weeks after Trump denounced Democrat-aligned states for what he described as their "tremendous death rates", then-presidential candidate Joe Biden maintained he didn't view the issue through the lens of "blue states or red states".
"They're all the United States," he remarked during October's presidential debate, before adding without a hint of irony: "And look at the states that are having such a spike in coronavirus — they're the red states."
America's major political parties have moved further apart on most important political issues over the last several decades, says Dr Shaun Ratcliff, a lecturer in political science at the US Studies Centre, and so it is, in many ways, unsurprising that COVID-19 has become a "casualty in this period of polarisation".
A survey conducted by YouGov, for example, found 86 per cent of people who identified as Republican trusted Donald Trump to effectively handle the pandemic, compared to just 10 per cent of Democrats.
Similarly, 70 per cent of Democrats said they trusted the World Health Organization, compared to just 25 per cent of Republicans.
"And this is exacerbated by certain individuals, Donald Trump being the main one, where he's frequently downplayed the severity of the virus... and frequently been critical of the idea that large scale restrictions are the solution.
"We know that most voters don't hold strong views on policy positions... so we look for cues from people we respect.... certainly, people that like Donald Trump, or the Republican party, are certainly going to be paying attention to the messages they're sending on this."
Voters view COVID 'through a partisan lens'
While 42 per cent of respondents surveyed by VoteCast said the coronavirus pandemic was the most important issue facing the country, it would seem it did little to sway political allegiances.
A post-election analysis by the Associated Press has revealed counties with the highest number of new cases per capita overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump (93 per cent) — a rate above other less severely hit areas.
It reflects similar pre-election surveys — conducted by the United States Studies Centre, La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne — which found that those who said they would vote for Trump became less worried about coronavirus between May (19 per cent) and September (11 per cent), even as national case numbers spiked.
"And one of the things we found led to a decline in concern was a reliance on conservative news media, so Fox News and Breitbart."
Indeed, a survey of trust in news outlets during the pandemic found that those who nominated conservative news sources in their top five media outlets were more likely to be critical of coronavirus restrictions.
Seventy per cent of those who listed Breitbart as their choice of news outlet, for example, said lockdowns in the United States had "gone too far", compared to just 11 per cent of those who nominated MSNBC.
"Because its become a political issue, voters in the US are seeing it through a partisan lens — they're not just looking at it as an apolitical issue, they're seeing it in a political way," Ratcliff says.
"And we're seeing a big difference in how Democrats and Republicans see the virus as a threat."
Biden faces an uphill battle
The question now, of course, is whether a Biden administration will be able to unite a nation split down the middle, in the hopes of implementing a uniform approach to the pandemic.
"The refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another is not due to some mysterious force beyond our control," the president-elect signalled during his victory speech.
"It's a decision. It's a choice we make. And if we can decide not to cooperate, then we can decide to cooperate."
Though nice in theory, it's an objective that will be harder to pull off in practice, says Ratcliff, who points to the limitations of the president's role.
Meaningful change will need to be implemented at a local or state level, he says, and that requires the cooperation of lawmakers, whose views on mask-wearing and other public health measures do not always align.
"So president-elect Biden, when he takes office, will require the cooperation of a large number of Republicans," Ratcliff says.
That "doesn't mean it couldn't happen", however, Ratcliff cautions.
While anti-lockdown sentiments were amplified under the Trump Presidency, once a new administration is sworn in "you won't be getting those messages from the very top of the party that are downplaying the serious of the virus".
"One of the reasons Republican elected officials may have been a little bit less proactive is maybe they felt pressure not to contradict the president," Ratcliff says.
"If there's a different message coming from the White House, it might provide some Republican officials with more wiggle room to do more.
"But what we've seen at this stage at least is that... Biden might find it difficult in some states at least to get cooperation on strong measures."
