Comment on COVID lessons from Puerto Rico

The BDN Editorial Board operates independently from the newsroom, and does not set policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com. With a new COVID variant emerging and with Maine hitting new records last week for the number of people hospitalized with COVID, it feels reasonable to ask if there was another, better way to tackle the illness that has killed more than 775,000 Americans, more than 1,300 of them in Maine. In fact, Puerto Rico, an American territory in the Caribbean, offers a look at a different path. Despite a fragile health care system and a strong distrust of the federal government, which was reinforced by the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico now has one of the highest vaccination rates of any U.S.