US COVID Failure

Most people don't grasp the sheer magnitude of the US's failure when it comes to COVID. When you look at how many extra deaths we've had, during the pandemic, versus what we would have expected given pre-pandemic mortality rates, it makes so many other things we worry about look trivial -- like a rounding error in the big picture. Whether we're talking school shootings or terrorism or war deaths, so much of what we fret about just doesn't come close.

Over a period of this length, we should have had about 6.5 million deaths, based on pre-pandemic mortality rates. Instead, we've had about 7.6 million. That 1.1 million extra deaths, thanks to COVID, is 17% mortality elevation. Much of that was avoidable. Japan and Germany, the next two biggest wealthy nations, had excess deaths of 0% and 4%, respectively. Canada, arguably the nation that's closest to us in terms of level of isolation and cultural issues, had 3%. Even within the US, some individual states managed to have much lower mortality elevation, despite dense populations and little isolation, like Massachusetts at a little under 8%.

So, think about what that would mean if we, as a nation, had managed to do as well as Canada.... or even just Massachusetts. We'd be talking about a death toll somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000, instead of 1.1 million. Thus, we can say the cost of our failure, was something like 750,000 extra deaths.

Now, compare that to the kinds of issues we spend so much time discussing (and remember, I'm not counting all COVID deaths... just those we could realistically have avoided merely by performing on par with most advanced societies.)

Wars? 7,051 US soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. That's not even a week's worth of COVID deaths. In fact, you could add all the Americans killed in every war in our history, other than the Civil War, and not reach 750,000. Think about that: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, WWI, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War, 1812, the Revolutionary War, countless Indian Wars and police actions, all totaled, and still fewer dead than than the mortality caused by our incompetence in handling COVID.

Terrorism? Well, our extra COVID death toll is like suffering a 9/11 attack every single month for 20 straight years. Every four days or so, on average, our incompetent handling of COVID was killing more Americans than all the terrorist attacks in history combined.

School shootings? At the current rate of school homicides (36/year), the 750,000 who needlessly died because we botched COVID response is like nearly 21,000 years of such school massacres.

This pandemic and its handling in America will be the subject of many future scholarly papers. It was the perfect storm of an incompetent egotistical buffoon at the top, and a pool of dupes willing to believe any nonsensical crap flowing from his blowhole. Trump instantly politicized a disease that cares not for your political POV, with the help of the propagandists at Fox, OAN, etc. In Florida and other states this is still going on. FL leads the country currently in new infections, yet its Trumpian governor threatened the Special Olympics with millions of dollars ($75M) in fines if they mandated vaccines for competitors and others attending. History will not treat DiSantis or Trump kindly.
 
Interestingly, Sweden has fewer active infections currently than does the state of Florida. Can you explain the difference?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

round four of the nearly non-lethal Biden variation hasn't spread to Sweden.......meanwhile the current daily deaths from virus is lower per capita in Florida than in Sweden.....(Florida had 7, Sweden had 4).....did you know twice as many people live in Florida than in Sweden?......

by the way, you are more likely to be stabbed in NYC than to die of corona virus in Florida......
 
He can't read my posts due to forced ignore. But you can tell him that Israel and the Jews charge the Mars batteries with their space lasers. :laugh:

I mean the poor guy is obviously off his rocker. But I wish he/she would find some other way to release the crazy. Most people just stand on top of soap boxes, naked, on street corners yelling like moon bats into the ether.

I guess JP's this guy's street corner. It's better this way - because no one can see that the troll is naked.
 
You can't deal with reality. You run your big mouth to spread propaganda but you are incapable of adult conversation.

LOL, Oh, my God I am truly laughing at you in real life. I'm so sorry you hate yourself so much you have to attempt to inflect your excruciating pain upon others.

Suck a dog's butt.
 
LOL, Oh, my God I am truly laughing at you in real life. I'm so sorry you hate yourself so much you have to attempt to inflect your excruciating pain upon others.

Suck a dog's butt.
drama queen
a person who habitually responds to situations in a melodramatic way.

effeminate
(of a man) having or showing characteristics regarded as typical of a woman; unmanly.
 
drama queen
a person who habitually responds to situations in a melodramatic way.

effeminate
(of a man) having or showing characteristics regarded as typical of a woman; unmanly.

Aww... I think I'm going to cry at that "expert" smack, moron. The fact you think you sound clever is one of the most hilarious things about you!
 
"What we got during COVID was not an inept response, it was the inverse of a good response, and you cant get there through incompetence. Had they simply failed that would be one thing, but what they gave us was a recipe for disaster. To the extent that they were willing to do that for whatever reason, and allow the harm to flow from it that did, I have to think of them in that way (as the enemy)."

I think in some cases there really was something beyond incompetence. I think that once Biden took office, Republicans took the view that failing to get COVID under control would hurt him politically, and so they did whatever they could to stop him. That included things like asserting state rights against federal authority to block anti-COVID measures, and also asserting state rights against municipal, local, or even corporate authority, when anti-COVID measures were happening there. DeSantis was the king of that, with his imperial governorship working to fight any effort to reduce COVID infections, including threatening to punish companies and other private organizations that tried to protect their workers and customers.

Some of that maliciousness was abuse of the "bully pulpit." Trump, for example, used his presidency to set a terrible example, by hosting super-spreader events and ridiculing those who wore masks, as well as sowing confusion by hyping snake-oil cures. He also encouraged complacency by assuring people COVID was just going to magically disappear.

Biden hasn't been a whole lot more effective, but at least it wasn't a lack of trying. Unfortunately, by the time he took office, the Republicans had thoroughly politicized what ought to have been apolitical public health policy questions, such that right-wingers, from the grass roots up through the high court, saw it as a test of tribal loyalty to push back against anything he tried to do to fight the virus.
 
The devastation of the COVID vaccines in children


Fortunately, COVID vaccines have proven to be very safe in children. What isn't safe is COVID itself. It has killed 1,086 children in the US, alone. That's more than 30 years of school shootings combined!
 
It's because the MAG-idiots thought it would be better for America for them to play their little culture war game than it would be to save their fellow Americans' lives. So they threw a temper tantrum about masks and vaccines, attacked Fauci mercilessly, just to be dicks.

Republicans suck so hard.

Agreed. And it's a top-to-bottom thing. It involved Republican governors, Republicans on the high court, and wingnuts in media, but also everyday people who proudly avoided taking any measures that might protect the vulnerable around them. It was effectively a Plague of Sociopaths.
 
The sad thing is - it truly didn't bother most Repukes to get vaxxed and to wear masks. They just saw it as a cynical political opportunity to cry, "your taking our freedom" when every one of the fucks have been vaxxed their whole life for other stuff.

Republicans are evil, cynical, opportunistic traitors to this nation.

Yep. You saw that particularly with military personnel, who regularly rolled up their sleeves for any number of vaccines, no questions asked, as part of their job... including some pretty nasty cocktails before deploying to tropical areas. But then, the moment they saw this as a test of tribal loyalty rather than a simple public health matter, they dug their heels in and refused to take the COVID vaccine (especially bizarre given the fact that the unprecedented breadth of the vaccine roll-out globally means that we're surer of its safety and efficacy than almost any other vaccine they previously had).
 
Agreed. And it's a top-to-bottom thing. It involved Republican governors, Republicans on the high court, and wingnuts in media, but also everyday people who proudly avoided taking any measures that might protect the vulnerable around them. It was effectively a Plague of Sociopaths.

I just wish the Repukes had picked another topic to be assholes about. But, no, just to be dicks and show everyone how "free" they are, they held a bunch of superspreader events and killed more people.

Many more people would be alive today if Repukes and their propaganda wing, Fox News, would have supported mitigation efforts instead of being cynical opportunists.
 
Yep. You saw that particularly with military personnel, who regularly rolled up their sleeves for any number of vaccines, no questions asked, as part of their job... including some pretty nasty cocktails before deploying to tropical areas. But then, the moment they saw this as a test of tribal loyalty rather than a simple public health matter, they dug their heels in and refused to take the COVID vaccine (especially bizarre given the fact that the unprecedented breadth of the vaccine roll-out globally means that we're surer of its safety and efficacy than almost any other vaccine they previously had).

Exactly. You know the story about the frog and the scorpion? Republicans are America's scorpions. It's their nature to self-destruct and try to take everyone with them. They're like a psycho boyfriend who kills his lover because "if I can't have her, then no one else can". <--- I tell you I think it's like that with these rednecks.
 
Charging a battery on mars is impossible yet Wikipedia tells us the rovers lasted for a decade or more.
There's the right-wing conspiracy goon in a nutshell. Now, somehow, we're meant to believe it's impossible to charge a battery on Mars, even though we know exactly how they did it:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/12...aker sunlight than,of the production on Earth.
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/1264/curiositys-daily-update-curiositys-batteries-get-a-charge/

It really can feel like we're living in the movie "Idiocracy." We've got a bunch of halfwits who struggled even to get through remedial high school science classes, and who haven't improved their scientific understanding in decades, yet who now are convinced they're privy to some secret scientific wisdom that has eluded those of us with far better educations, including those who actually work in relevant fields.
 
why not use Sweden as your retroactive role model?....

Sweden isn't a very good analog for the US, since it's relatively isolated. A better comparison for Sweden are its own neighbors: Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Sweden has had 1,004 cumulative excess deaths per million residents. Norway has had 418, Finland 889, and Denmark 300. Sweden was actually doing even worse, relative to its neighbors, back in 2020, when they tried their catastrophic "let's just let the virus run wild and see what happens" policy. But, fortunately, they eventually realized that was a tragically stupid move, and when vaccines showed up, they adopted them aggressively. 75% of Swedes are fully vaccinated against COVID, which isn't far behind Finland and Denmark, and is actually ahead of Norway. By comparison, in the US it's just 67%. That Swedish campaign of mass vaccination meant that they compared just fine to their neighbors in 2021, so all that increased excess mortality we see relative to those neighbors for the pandemic as a whole is just the lasting impact of the harm they did themselves back in 2020.
 
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