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Mammoth Springs

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Unlucky us

Why is the United States bearing the brunt of the global pandemic? Confirmed cases here have doubled to over a million in the last three weeks. What did we do wrong in our approach to the contagion and what lessons should we learn from our experience?
The number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States surpassed 1 million on Tuesday, more than doubling in less than three weeks, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.The U.S., home to about 4% of the global population, has reported about one-third of the world’s more than 3 million known coronavirus infections. The first known cases of the virus in China began appearing in December. It took nearly four months for the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. to hit 500,000 on April 10. Of the more than 213,000 people who have died of COVID-19 worldwide, roughly 25% ― or about 57,000 deaths ― have occurred in the United States.
Does it sound like we are actually ready to open things up? 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Opening some states and not others, is like peeing in a swimming pool." - Becky Quick, CNBC

Anonymous said...

Actual quote: "Opening some states and not others, is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool."

Sorry for the bad typing omission...pre-coffee syndrome.

Blue Heron said...

You are good. Thanks.I forgot my coffee in the morning yesterday and was a wreck all day.

JeffN said...

I can think of 3-4 reasons why it seems we're getting hit so hard.

1. Our counts, while very flawed and low, are more reliable than many other countries. I wouldn't trust the disease numbers from Russia, China, Iran, etc.
2. Our government delayed any response for 4-8 weeks after they should have taken action. Federal intelligence sources warned the White House in January. The federal government response in the US is, IMHO, a mass-murder crime.
3. Our population is (was) very mobile. Air travel is widely available and common. That, with the government's tragically delayed response, is a perfect dispersion machine.

Altogether, at the moment I see no future except the one in which we lose a million+ Americans to the virus. It didn't have to be that way, but that's the track we're on.