According to the coronavirus dashboard created by Avi Schiffman, yesterday the US passed the 200,000 mark in deaths from the disease. The US continues to lead the world in both deaths and the number of cases, the latter number now about 6,800,000. The numbers are growing fast in India and Brazil.
What is infuriating is that the US numbers would have been much lower if Trump and the people around him and listened to the infectious disease and public health experts at the beginning and implemented their recommendations, most of which are extremely commonsensical, such as washing or sanitizing one’s hands, avoiding close proximity to others, and wearing masks, with the government coordinating a national policy of supplying protective equipment to health care personnel and the public and aggressively promoting widespread testing.
Instead we had, and continue to have, Trump promoting magical thinking that the virus will somehow disappear on its own, even though we now know that he was aware from almost the beginning that the virus was dangerous and could be transmitted by airborne particles.
As I comment, the worldwide death toll is 942,744. At an average of about 5,000 dead per day, it will be a million before the end of September.
In the past week, the world added over 300,000 new recorded cases on two separate days. Expect that to become a regular thing.
If the wikipedia numbers can be trusted, the mortality rate in the US is 2.5 times the Canadian rate. That’s 120,000 deaths which can be put at Trump’s door.
“Dr Anthony Fauci offered a grim prediction [back in March]: the coronavirus could kill as many as 200,000 Americans”, Fauci warns coronavirus could kill as many as 200,000 Americans (March 2020). At the time, there was about 2,200 deaths (in the States), two orders of magnitude less.
As of 15 September 2020, Sweden, which did not lock down, reports a death rate of 579 people per million of population.
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The USA, on the other hand, which did lock down and for the most part remains locked down, reports a death rate of 603 per million.
.
Why in the hell are we locked down?
FFe:
For certain values of “locked down”.
It matters whether it’s done at the right time (early on) and kept up sufficiently, instead of being ad hoc and inconsistent and prematurely rescinded, only to be reimposed when reality rears its ugly head. Grats, you managed to get the downside without the upside!
(Here in Oz, we had lockdowns — one still ongoing in Victoria — and are at 33 deaths per million)