One week in an America riven by politics and the plague

On Nov. 1, as election week dawned, Dr. Juan Fitz lay dying in the same Lubbock, Texas, hospital where he had worked in the emergency room for nearly 20 years.

Months before, he had told a professional journal of his fear that he would bring COVID-19 home to his two young children. But the Army veteran persisted: “Like I tell my students and residents, 'I am airborne, I am cavalry, I go into the thick of it and, challenged by the situation, find ways to improve and sort things out.’”

Now he was on a ventilator, and his time was ticking away.

On that same day, President Donald Trump sprinted across the country, trying to seal the deal on his reelection in the waning moments of the campaign. At his fifth rally of the day, in Opa-Locka, Florida, he lamented that when “You turn on the news, it’s COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID.”

When the predominantly mask-less crowd of thousands responded with a chant of “Fire Fauci! Fire Fauci!” the president seemed to suggest that he might contemplate dispatching one of the world’s most trusted authorities on the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“Don’t tell anybody,” he said. “But let me wait till a little bit after the election.”

This was just the start of an election week like none other in American history.

“Voting is a civic sacrament,” the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, the famed president of the University of Notre Dame, once said. But in 2020, as a viral plague and corrosive politics converged, there was no time and little inclination to celebrate democracy — there was just partisan bile, and a mounting roll of the sick and the dead.

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Federal authorities sent an astonishing message to the states on Aug. 27, the day Trump accepted the Republican nomination for a second term: Be ready to distribute a COVID-19...