COVID-19 surging the world over yet again and no end in sight. More lockdowns that will lead to more riots, looting, murder and mayhem, how surreal and haunting these days are. And it didn’t need to be this way at all. I was hoping these dark days would’ve brought out the best in people’s humanity. But I’m sadly mistaken and it seems to have done the complete opposite and brought out people’s inhumanity to one another. Am I the only person who feels this way? I can’t be the only one? The more and more I speak with people these days the future seems bleak. Many even say their intuition is telling them that something is extremely dire in our midst. As if COVID-19 and all its cause and effect isn’t enough. But I must agree I’ve felt it too. I don’t think anyone can put a finger on what it is that’s ‘coming’. But I believe we are in for a very big awakening, something traumatic.
It makes me ponder the whole God concept. Why would God allow these awful things to happen? But it’s not about God it’s about us, human beings. We are the ones that allow it to happen and we are all complicit in some way. Last time I checked we lived in a democratic society and we look to our leaders to lead, but sadly this has not been the case.
It almost seems like a lifetime ago, given the untimely and tragic passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And yet, the U.S. has surpassed the grim milestone of 200,000 deaths, it must be understood and carefully considered just how badly Donald Trump’s White House failed on COVID-19. This isn’t one of incompetence, bumbling ineptitude, but something far worse. Malign indifference. Simply letting hundreds of thousands die. Americans have become paralyzed and are literally in shock. While COVID-19 was making its way to America’s shores, it had ample time to prepare. It was one of the last countries to be hit by COVID-19. And during those critical months and weeks, nothing — let me repeat — nothing was done! It recently emerged that the Postal Service was supposed to mail a facemask to every American. That is precisely the kind of thing that would and should have happened in a sane and rational country. And it was the Trump Administration that stopped it dead in its tracks. Remember, pandemics spread exponentially. That is why if you nip them in the bud, before exponential growth accelerates — that is your best chance of stopping them. It is why some nations have been spectacularly successful — Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam and New Zealand— and some, like America, have had the world’s worst outcomes.
“It is completely unfathomable that we’ve reached this point,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a John Hopkins University public health researcher, eight months after the scourge first reached the world’s richest nation, with its state-of-the-art laboratories, top-flight scientists and stockpiles of medical supplies. The number of dead is equivalent to a 9/11 attack every day for 67 days. And it is still climbing. Deaths are running at close to 1,000 a day on average, and a widely cited model from the University of Washington predicts the U.S. toll will double to 400,000 by the end of the year as schools and colleges reopen and cold weather sets in. A vaccine is unlikely to become widely available until 2021. “The idea of 200,000 deaths is really very sobering, in some respects stunning,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said on CNN. The bleak milestone was reported by John Hopkins, based on figures supplied by state health authorities. But the real toll is thought to be much higher, in part because many COVID-19 deaths were probably ascribed to other causes, especially early on, before widespread testing. Trump said it was “a shame” the U.S. reached that number but argued the toll could have been much worse.
There was actually a plan to do something about COVID-19 — a plan that could have made a crucial difference. But Donald Trump deep-sixed it. It is no overstatement to say that he is responsible for mass death. His choice resulted in the exponential growth of a pandemic. Now, the Post Office’s plan was to send five reusable facemasks to Americans. Doesn’t sound like a lot. But it could have been built on, as emergent plans in emergencies often are. America could have found itself in a situation like this: the Postal Service sent Americans face masks every week, and the government mandating wearing them, in any public place.
Publicly, Trump minimized COVID-19's impact. He denied it was a problem, pretended it wouldn’t be a big deal, and then, finally, told people to drink bleach and inject Lysol. But privately, Trump knew something very, very different. He said — literally — “This is deadly stuff.” How deadly? He called it a “great and powerful plague” And he didn’t just know how lethal it was. He knew how viral it was, too. He noted that it’s “so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.” In other words, Trump knew along. All that’s on tape, by the way, thanks to Bob Woodward.
Trump knew in great detail just how deadly COVID-19 was. And he told Americans precisely the opposite story. And then he acted to put in place policies that reflected his lie, like stopping face masks being distributed, not mandating wearing them, refusing to wear one himself. To this day, America has no COVID-19 policy or strategy. That is why the death toll is simply skyrocketing every single day, reaching astonishing numbers. It took just 10 days for America to go from 190,000 deaths to 200,000 — deaths have stabilized at about 1,000 per day. 1,000 people a day are needlessly dying from coronavirus in America. Really ‘think’ about how many people that is.
America is still a racists and classist country, and COVID-19 hit the poor and minorities hardest. America is also the home of the Darwinian logic of self-reliance — the strong should survive and the weak perish, and so Americans have had a cultural tendency not to care about COVID-19 the way that nearly every other country on earth has.
In any other developed nation, by now, a leader would have been held accountable for such crass negligence. The streets in the capital would be one giant protest, for months on end, until the leader stepped down. (Yes, some Americans are protesting. And I applaud them. But it isn’t close enough yet to a mass movement, with the stamina to challenge Trump.) But when faced with this improbable and horrific fact — Trump lied and 200,000 died— Americans seem to be paralyzed. Resigned.
Plenty of leaders have gotten away with terrible things. Stalin, Mao, Saddam — the list is endless. But thanks to its misplaced feeling of exceptionalism, Americans think of themselves as above such nations. They look down upon such countries. But the truth is we have become one. A place where an authoritarian’s negligence results in mass death — and terrorized, traumatized, timid, fearful people cannot hold him accountable for it, and so he simply gets away with it. Americans cannot really fully process the scale of the horror — a kind of denial and willful ignorance kicks in, even among the good people. They become a silent majority this way — because who can really sit down and think the thought: “hundred of thousands of people died just because of one man’s maliciousness?”
To end with I’d like to point out that the U.S. is currently 46th in the world in terms of life expectancy. So why would COVID-19 deaths be any different? All of these same factors that impact our COVID prevalence and COVID deaths also are in many ways similar to what leads to our higher overall deaths as well. But what is important to realize is that is wasn’t always this way in the U.S. From 1975–1980, we were 17th in the world in life expectancy. But there has been a slow (and recently not so slow) decline since the early 1980s. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess but if you follow the science the future is very very grim indeed.
Vincent Lyn
CEO/Founder at We Can Save Children
Its agreat worry and soul moment for my American friends because all is written here by Vincent is true it rilly hurts to see the most super power country perishing like the worst countries of Africa it hurts alot