Trump, curiously, was selected and celebrated precisely for his gleeful assault on norms. But during this pandemic, he has been remarkably hesitant to help establish a new way of life. Only under duress did he start to encourage a national program of social distancing. He persisted in shaking hands at news conferences, even when the rest of us were leaving six-foot wedges between ourselves and our fellow citizens. He says that he, personally, won’t wear a face mask.

Trump was certainly not the only official who was slow to adapt. Human beings are hard-wired to follow the herd. On March 2 Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, was still encouraging New Yorkers to “get out on the town despite the coronavirus.” He went to the gym in Brooklyn on March 16, even after he’d announced the city schools were shutting down. (Then again, Trump, on March 2, said he expected deaths to be in a “much smaller range” than those from the flu. On March 10, he still said: “Just stay calm. It will go away.”)

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, perhaps the most trusted man in America right now, admitted recently that he rode the subway to work in the early days of the pandemic. “When the White House heard that, they went completely nuts,” he said.

“If some people are riding the subway, how bad could it be?” Gilbert said when I asked him about this phenomenon — what psychologists call “normative influence.” No one wants to be a chump. “Human beings look to other human beings to know what to do,” he said. “It’s the primary way we know what to do.”

Which makes the early action of some of our governors all the more remarkable — particularly Mike DeWine of Ohio. On March 3, the day after de Blasio was encouraging New Yorkers to mingle, DeWine was canceling the Arnold Classic, a health-and-fitness Lollapalooza that draws some 60,000 participants from 80 countries. (It was named after Arnold Schwarzenegger, natch.)

I spoke to DeWine last week to try to determine what, precisely, gave him the fortitude to cancel that event. He was three days ahead of the city officials in Austin, Tex., who canceled South by Southwest, and at the time even that was considered extreme. He canceled school before any governor in the nation. He shut down restaurants and bars long before New York. And his state had far fewer cases of Covid-19 than New York.

And he’s a Republican. Red-state governors have been far more reluctant to issue stay-at-home orders during this pandemic than blue-state governors. To this day, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota still hasn’t issued one, though more than 300 workers in a pork-processing factory in her state fell ill, forcing the entire plant to shut down on Sunday.