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Last week, we were told the President of the United States has COVID-19, but it wasn’t a big deal, as White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told the media: “We knew this was going to happen. At some point, everyone is going to get COVID.”
Leana Wen, the former health commissioner of Baltimore, chimed in in the Washington Post endorsing Jean-Pierre’s fatalism, adding: “Another key lesson is that it’s inevitable that everyone—even the president of the United States—will be exposed to the coronavirus[…]COVID-19 is a manageable disease for almost everyone, so long as they use the tools available to them.”
Manageable. Except we have daily deaths hovering around 400 per day, making the U.S. the worldwide leader in COVID-19 associated mortality in absolute terms, with only a few real competitors among nations of our size and wealth if we look at it per capita or in terms of excess deaths per capita as well. In addition, we’ve had about 40,000 people hospitalized, about 4600 in intensive care over the past week or so.
And this is on top of what Boston University’s Jacob Bor calls our “missing Americans,” those we have lost to early death compared to other rich nations. Bor and his team estimate that if U.S. age-specific mortality rates had equaled those of other wealthy nations we would have saved 626,353 in 2019 before COVID-19 struck. In 2021, there were 1,092,293 “Missing Americans” in the midst of the pandemic.
So much winning.
One has to wonder what the hell is going on. When did it become aspirational as a nation, to reach for the top slot in COVID-19 mortality, to ignore the fact that we are losing hundreds of thousands of Americans yearly to early death even before the pandemic and that our life expectancy ranks in the 30s or 40s compared to…
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Source : time
