The last time my neighbors and I sheltered in place was seven years ago, in April, 2013. On April 15th, two bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon; three people were killed, and more than two hundred and fifty injured. As the wounded were rushed to twenty-seven hospitals, people stayed inside, in case of further attacks. The police closed the streets to inspect suspicious packages. A few days later, after the bombers had been identified, a manhunt began. One of the bombers was killed following a shootout with the police, and the other was captured after an extensive chase, which involved a citywide lockdown. The bombers shot three people while they were on the run—an M.I.T. police officer, a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority police officer, and a Boston police officer. One of them died immediately, and another a year later.

There are many differences between that experience and the pandemic that we’re caught up in now. The lockdown during the hunt for the bombers was short—less than twenty hours—and, considering the scale and surprise of the attack, the disruption was quite small. Although we experienced a sense of vulnerability, the threat we faced was specific and visible, not microscopic and pervasive. The whole event was over within days. But the most striking difference, at least from today’s perspective, has to do with leadership. Back then, for the most part, elected officials spoke with one voice, and there was little squabbling, blame-gaming, or turf-grabbing. It was a week of anxiety, punctuated by false reports and periods of chaos, but, in the realm of disaster response, the Boston Marathon bombing was a case study in professionalism.

A few months later, the United States Senate held a hearing to learn from the event’s emergency response. A team of Harvard researchers began studying it, too. For several months after the bombing, researchers with the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative interviewed key participants. They wanted to know how, in a city famous for its political and law-enforcement rivalries, so many people had worked together so seamlessly, and how that kind of behavior might be encouraged in the future. “We wanted to understand the elements of that reaction,” Leonard Marcus, a crisis-leadership expert and the founding director of the initiative, said. “What is it about humans? What is it that would bring us together?” Eric McNulty, a researcher on the team who was also a birder, came up with an analogy: he said that the behavior reminded him of “swarm intelligence”—the phenomenon in which groups of animals act in concert. Birds flocking, fish schooling, ants creating colonies—each individual knowing what to do.

Marcus and his colleagues ran with the idea. In a series of reports and, later, a book, they proposed that swarm intelligence in people occurs when all the members of a group come together to create a synergy that magnifies their individual capabilities. It’s the kind of unselfish behavior that one sees on the battlefield, when soldiers know that they depend on one another for their lives. Swarm intelligence is more instinctual than coöperation, in which people work deliberately together to achieve a common goal; it’s an emotional and reactive behavior, not a plan that can be written out on a flowchart. Sometimes it happens on a sports team, as with the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the self-described “bunch of idiots” who took delight in the game and won the franchise its first World Series title in eighty-six years. Sometimes it doesn’t: the 2012 Red Sox, despite having some of the best talents in the league, lacked a certain chemistry and came in last in their division. It can happen when there’s no team at all, as when thousands of people mobilized to make masks for hospital workers during the current pandemic. It arises from the feeling that we’re in this together.

The pandemic, clearly, is a medical and scientific crisis; the virus is being fought in hospitals and labs. But our response also depends on social coöperation. Although it’s true that leaders who understand the science will do better than those who don’t, science isn’t all that matters; without unity of purpose, we’ll fail. How can leaders encourage such unity? What can they do to help all of us, as a group, act more intelligently?

For the rest of this New Yorker article, please click here.