We have perhaps 1/25th of the testing we need, 1/25th of the contact tracers we need, and no sign of the sustained decline in infections or deaths we were told was a necessary precondition for the reopening anywhere we are now beginning. (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"This is not how the rest of the world is trending. At the end of February, South Korea had more cases than any country outside of China. In April, 85 South Koreans died from the disease; in the U.S., that month, 62,000 died — 85 every single hour."
"More recently, with many fewer resources, the state of Kerala, in India, has managed to drive all the way to zero its number of cases through an aggressive regime of testing and tracing."
Not everyone has done as well as South Korea and Kerala. But consider this array of disease curves, perhaps the single clearest and most succinct indictment of the performance of the United States as a whole during this pandemic:
"Why is the U.S. story so exceptional? As the pandemic wears on, and even those other countries that had been slow to respond to the crisis turn their own corners, it is increasingly hard to hang our failures on anything but the president’s refusal to lead."
"What makes this especially strange is that Trump is an inveterate political animal, obsessed above all else with his own ratings and popularity, and should be able to see that his political success depends on getting the disease and the economy somewhat back on its feet."
"But he hasn’t even tried, not even bothering to feel out the options made available to him by the crisis — true wartime power, expanded surveillance capacities, and much more leeway in other areas, should he choose to focus on them."
"Which is another reminder that, for all liberals have worried over the president’s authoritarian tendencies, he has behaved in office much more like the con man he was in business than all the Mussolinis, Erdogans, and Putins he professed to admire in politics."
"Over the last few years, at every juncture when faced with an opportunity to seize more power, he has chosen instead to do what he can to avoid responsibility."
"He is doing that now, with his reelection hanging in the balance — apparently preferring to be able to blame a loss in November on this virus, at the cost of perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives, than to give himself a chance of winning, and a chance of saving them." (x/x)
