Posted on 08/03/2020 3:39:15 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planets most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.
In the first half of 2020, SARS‑CoV‑2the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID‑19infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the worlds population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths. These numbers are estimates. The actual toll, though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens.
Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantagesimmense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertiseit floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined, Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.
Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. Ive learned that almost everything that went wrong with Americas response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nations ability to prevent the pathogens spread.
A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness.
Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. T
The decades-long process of shredding the nations social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood.
The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.
How leftist mayors and govenors destroyed America.
And the Communists/Marxists/Neo-Marxists/Socialist that have worked against us are going to pay dearly.
It’s a frigging flu strain , good grief, and what about H1N1 under bozo the clown racist.
How did it come to this? Cowardly response by dhimmicrats.
The pandemic didn’t defeat us.
At times we were our own worst enemy in making decisions on how to deal with it though.
If they say Trump did a bad job then why do they say Fauci is doing a great job when he is telling Trump what to do on this? All about the election
Will not click on article, but lemme guess. The summary of the Atlantic article is that this is all Trump’s fault, right.
The left did the exact same thing to Bush with Katrina. COVID is nothing more than a political tool to politically bludgeon Trump. Saw a Biden ad where they are blaming Trump for the chaos in Portland!
Good Lord, what ridiculous editorializing
And of course, even the Pandemic is “racist”
Because EVERYTHING’s RACIST
Ed could do us all a favor and take the gas pipe
Yeah, well this is from The Atlantic.
As we know, nothing but leftist drivel oozes like pus out of this magazine.
I want to see a montage of Fauci contradicting himself over and over again.
Ummm.... other countries are lying about their numbers?
The Atlantic is an MSM lefwing rag which alters facts to worsen any situation. That’s what the media does. They are Merchants of Fear.
total BS, the virus had already been here for before we even knew of it.
There was NOTHING we could of done better, EXCEPT, NOT OVER-REACT!
Over-reacting was the only thing we did wrong.
In the past... this would of just been considered a bad flu season and we would of moved on.
EXACTLY. ...ONE of the two is wrong...and it’s FAUCI the virus fairy
1) We’re not defeated
2) Our political posturing dysfunction is our own worst enemy, and also our collective greatest asset
3) The Alphabet Swamp is squarely to blame; this is the entire job of the HHS, CDC, FDA et al. They never replenished the PPE after depleting it all a decade ago. They never warned about the oursourcing of medicine production. We spend tens of billions (or more) on these agencies but they failed us horribly. I simply don’t believe that contingencies for this kind of illness do not exist. Someone wrote a plan for it, but the Alphabet Swamp likely just filed it away and it’s still on a shelf somewhere. Bureaucrat bosses don’t answer to underling technocrats.
So the Spanish Flu failed to destroy the nation but the Wuhan Flu has.Why? Because the President,as well as Governors and Mayors or all parties,respected the rights guaranteed to *all* citizens in *all* states by the United States Constitution.
Does he know that two cruise lines just restarted, one in Norway and the other in French Polynesia, and they both got Covid infected on their first voyages?
-PJ
Dust mote, that is serious. We are all going to die again.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.