With the celebration of the Biden-Harris victory, it’s easy to lose touch with just how precarious our public health situation remains here in New Jersey amidst the latest spike in COVID cases.

While a review the Garden State’s electoral map is a way to gauge political party performance, it’s a real time heat map that reveals the conflict within our own state over how best to deal with a pandemic.

We  can’t wait until next year’s Inauguration to address this because our lack of consensus now will cause the body count from the virus to grow and risks it getting to a tipping point beyond our control.

As a consequence of the converging narratives of the presidential contest and our disjointed COVID response, the two presidential candidates came to represent two polar opposite views reduced down to whether or not we should wear masks as a public health measure.

The Red State Trumpian world view maintains such a mandate is coercive and undermines individual liberties. The Blue State Biden take is that everyone has an obligation to society’s collective well being and that wearing a mask is a civic duty not a burden.

But even within the Red  and Blue states themselves, there’s no uniformity of opinion for we are not just divided by state lines but fractured within our communities where we live and for far too many of us prematurely die.

While Democrats maybe tempted to do a celebratory end zone dance over the 56 percent to 43 percent won by Biden-Harris here in New Jersey, that would obscure the durability of the Trumpian world view down ballot throughout our state and the entire nation.

As we have painfully learned, it’s our local political sphere that defines how we respond to the pandemic and that’s where Democrats lost big time.

In October, a Stockton University poll found that one in three New Jersey adults surveyed thought that Trump was doing either an “excellent” or “good” job in his response to COVID, with another 11 percent giving him a “fair” grade.

Yes, it is true the President-elect Biden won more votes than any president in U.S. history but President Trump also got the second highest total ever, adding several  million votes to his 2016 total.

In this election cycle Trump carried Ocean, Cape May, Salem, Hunterdon, Warren and Sussex counties and added to his vote totals from 2016 in Atlantic, Bergen, Burlington, Gloucester, Hunterdon, and Mercer counties.

So, what happened in the state’s 2^nd CD, with the victory of Jeff Van Drew, the Democrat turned Trumpian Republican, over Amy Kennedy, a Democrat with a marquee name, was not an outlier and portends divides that will endure beyond Trump’s turn on the national stage.

In New York State, at the top of the ballot, we saw a similar convincing win for the Biden-Harris ticket, but the Democrats only carried 13 of the Empire State’s 62 counties and lost ground in the House of Representatives.

Across the country, even with crucial decennial reapportionment at stake, Democrats not only lost a handful of Congressional seats, but also failed to have the impact they needed on the makeup of the state legislatures.

“It’s an epic underperformance by Democrats. For all the money spent, Democrats aren’t going to be able to draw a single new congressional district as a result of this election that they hadn’t been able to draw before,” Michael Behm, a lobbyist who keeps tabs on state legislative elections, told The Hill. “The Republicans have been able to protect every majority that they needed to that draws congressional lines.”

It would appear that we have been through a once in a century mass casualty event in the US and here in New Jersey, where we lost 17,000 lives, and have radically divergent ideas about what actually happened.

And as a result there’s no consensus, seven months in, on what the best course of action is going forward and no collective grasp of the very real and daunting long term consequences for our nation and state.

No doubt, it very much depends on your news ecosystem. With the diminishment of local journalism, and the rise of social media aggregation as its substitute, its easy to take video footage of rioting and looting in one discrete place, like Portland, Oregon and have it shape the atmospherics everywhere else.

This growing capability for the virtual cyber world shaped by propagandists to define our situational awareness about actual local real world conditions has profound implications for being able to successfully address anything that requires collective action like civil defense and our public health.

This erosion in societal cohesion was a long time coming and predates the rise of Donald Trump who merely exploited it and even now seeks to profit from it. We saw it the crisis of confidence surrounding vaccinations for children that’s been years in the making.

With a highly contagious and deadly virus afoot can we afford to have such widely divergent views on what constitutes a clear and present danger?