'When Covid-19 surged through a N.D. community, a battle with the pandemic became a battle among its residents'

"When Covid-19 surged through a North Dakota community, a battle with the pandemic became a battle among its residents," The New Yorker says in a subhead atop a story by Atul Gawande from Minot, population 48,000, "in the worst-performing county in the worst-performing state in the worst-performing country in the world," writes Gawande. "I wanted to understand what made it so difficult for people to come together and address a deadly crisis."

Gawande, a native of Ohio, is a surgeon and a public-health researcher who writes about health for The New Yorker. He was a member of President Biden's Transition Covid-19 Advisory Board. He traces Minot's pandemic experience from the start to the Feb. 1 meeting of the City Council meeting, which voted for a mask mandate in city buildings after state "legislators prepared bills that would strip municipalities of the ability to adopt mask mandates when the state hadn’t done so, and the governor had declared the state to be in the low-risk category" and the mayor said he would lift the citywide mandate.