Trump's failures around Covid will be debated into eternity. You can't put every death at his feet, even in the countries that did it right, there were deaths. If you compare the graph for New Zealand Covid to the graph of USA, I can't help but see the initial bump that was the worst for New Zealand, is just a small bump for America, which keeps getting worse wave after wave. New Zealand did it right but still 25 people have died from Covid. Adjust that for population and that's about 1,673 cases would have been in USA if we'd been as effective as New Zealand. Now maybe it's harder to control more people, and there are a billion other reasons why New Zealand could do well, and the USA could not, but if you subtract say 2K from the USA total, we would only have 396K instead 398K dead recorded today. Well, that 2K, wildly exaggerated round up, would not be much of a drop in the bucket compared to nearly 400K. OK, maybe he is guilty of pretty much murdering 396K odd people so far.
Could the USA president have done what the New Zealand Prime Minister did? Is the USA's ideas of freedom make wearing a mask feel like a totalitarian move that the right wing would resist? Was Trump's inaction really just rubber stamping what the right wing would have done anyway? Is there more travel to the USA, is a larger population harder to control? We'll never know. What we will see is how much Biden's leadership and actually addressing the issue will mean to driving down numbers, past expectations, which is another metaphysic.
Some people say Sweden didn't enact measures and hoped for herd immunity. They say that is a valid strategy. High stakes games.
Basically if you drank Trump's kool aid, then you don't see it as his fault. If you hate Trump like I do, you do see it all as his fault. It's hard to figure out where the objective truth lies. The post-truth era of Trump has decreased the size of shared reality. I'm not sure what to do with that.
The Civil war was 650K, but I bet we get close to that, and for that I blame the south.
No comments:
Post a Comment