United States Reaches Half a Million Deaths From Covid-19

 Admittedly, I stopped covering the coronavirus crisis for several months, as it felt like it was getting a bit repetitive.              

This, however, was an obvious mark that is bound to raise eyebrows.              

It was under a year ago when the coronavirus crisis really hit the country full force. I remember the day when it stopped being merely theoretical, and started to clearly be impacting us in our everyday lives. That day was March 12th, and it was on that day when the first celebrity in our celebrity obsessed culture announced that he had tested positive. Then, the NBA cancelled games. Finally, then President Donald Trump made a speech on national television, when he finally seemed to take the coronavirus crisis seriously. Of course, he seemed to keep flipping back and forth from that point onward, unable to quite make up his mind about whether it was a serious threat to the country or not. We would later find out that he withheld information from the American public about just how grave the situation was in order, as he claimed, not to alarm Americans too much.              

And so, he began a campaign of misinformation that, inevitably, exacerbated the situation. Before long, the whole world was watching in horror as the nation that still officially ranks as the richest nation in the world mishandled the crisis with mixed messages. At one point, he said that there were 15 confirmed cases, but that it would quickly go down to zero, and then congratulated himself on that, as if by wishing it so, he would make it somehow turn into reality. But the number of cases did not go down to zero. In fact, the number of cases skyrocketed until, before long, we surpassed all other countries in terms of confirmed cases and, eventually, in terms of deaths from coronavirus. Since then, no other country has even come close to matching the United States either in confirmed cases or in deaths.              

Already, science denial had been one of the defining political traits of the international American reputation. After all, it is in the United States where climate change is most denied, often angrily, and it is also here where there is a strong campaign to try to teach children creationism, as an obvious attempt to refute evolution, without having to bother with any actual scientific proof. But the obvious denial of the seriousness of the coronavirus crisis became more immediate, and underscored this clearly enormous and influential force in our political reality. Plus, having someone in the Oval Office who claimed to know more about everything than even the experts, even as he often sounded like an absolute moron to all but his most loyal fans in explaining his half-baked theories, did not help.              

Before long, we as a nation began to serve as a perfect example for the rest of the world on what not to do, of precisely what to avoid in their handling of the Covid-19 crisis. It underscored the seeming dysfunction that had gone a long way towards sinking a nation who’s reputation for stability had once been stellar and served as a model for much of the rest of the world.              

But no longer.   

Our reputation started to really take a nosedive in recent decades, through a series of missteps and hubris that, in fact, has seriously hurt our once decent reputation. It seems that it has accelerated in the 21st century, beginning with us quickly squandering the sympathy the world had for us following the September 11th attacks by pursuing an immoral and unjustifiable war in Iraq, and numerous corporate scandals, illegal sptying on other nations and assumptions that we could kill anyone we wanted, anywhere, with drone strikes. Then came Trump, and the whole world recoiled in horror at the racism and xenophobia that seemed to be unleashed, as if it had once been frozen and kept separate, but was not, once again, on full display. Then, the disastrous response to the coronavirus crisis has made us look, once again, like fools who do not really know what we are doing.

The saddest aspect of this new marker of half a million now dead from Covid-19 is that, for the most part, this could have been completely avoidable with even halfway more decent and responsible leadership.