CORONA WATCH--America just passed the grimmest of milestones. A hundred thousand dead of Coronavirus.
How can sense be made of a such a colossal number? The mind reels. It’s staggering. When I think about it, my head spins.
I think, though, that it’s such a big number that it almost becomes meaningless. So let me try to put it in context for you.
Let me apologize to Don Lemon for borrowing his chyron as a title. I hope he doesn’t mind. I don’t often agree with CNN. But Don is exactly right in this case. The obvious implication here is that with responsible, strong, and decisive leadership — and maybe a population willing to follow along — America’s death toll could have been reduced massively. And America — maybe the whole world — needs to think harder about what “a hundred thousand deaths” really means.
You’re probably going to be shocked by what you’re about to read. You should be. Here are three simple facts everyone should know.
The first one, the obvious one, is that America has the world’s highest death toll — by a catastrophically long way which Americans still don’t really know. How much so, though? Here’s a number that you probably don’t know, that should stun you awake. Do you know how many people died in New Zealand? 21. Just twenty one.
Fact two: America’s 100,000 deaths are almost entirely needless. Yes, really: entirely needless. They never needed to happen.
Let me prove it to you with some simple math that even a schoolchild can handle. New Zealand has a population of 5 million. Those 21 people that died in New Zealand are .00042% of that population. So what’s the proportional number for America? America’s population is 330 million. What’s .00042% of 330 million? Go ahead and take a guess. 10,000? 15,000? 20,000?
It’s 1500.
If America had acted like New Zealand, just fifteen hundred people could have died. Instead, 100,000 people have died. Think about that for a moment.
Now, that’s a back of the envelope calculation. Actually the number is closer to 1400, but you get my point. Sure, you can say that America’s got denser cities or worse healthcare or a hundred other complicating factors. The point is this. Fifteen hundred versus a hundred thousand is not a reasonable difference. You can quintuple New Zealand’s numbers to be generous towards America — and end up at only 6,000 deaths. You’re still…two orders of magnitude…as in whole decimal places…away from 100,000.
That’s shocking. It’s surreal.
The calculation I’ve made above is simple, but it’s not inaccurate. It’s why even Columbia University epidemiologists calculate 90% or so of American Coronavirus deaths never needed to happen. You can go ahead and discount that, if you like. To 85%, 80%, 70%. We’re still talking about mass death on a scale that’s unparalleled in modern history.
This is a death toll so high that, as many commentators point out, it exceeds those of all America’s modern wars — and there have been many — put together.
So why does America have such a high death toll?
Fact three: America did almost everything wrong, and that’s Donald Trump’s fault. Needless death on a mass scale will be his legacy.
New Zealand had so few deaths because it did everything right. Not because — and this matters — of luck, a fluke, or just plain anomaly. It locked down early and firmly. It tested and traced. It had a national strategy to flatten the curve — and it ended up crunching it. The population followed right along, and the Prime Minister kept them encouraged, oriented, and directed. The result was — again — just 21 deaths. (Read the rest)
-cw
