One of the problems in hearing daily updates on the coronavirus in the United States is that numbers can be numbing.
One reason is that it’s easier to hear that our country has 180,000 deaths than it is to feel the grief of families that have lost just one loved one because of the coronavirus. Another reason numbers are so numbing is that we usually hear those numbers out of context. The media rarely compares the death rates for the U.S. with the rates of other countries.
Here is what that data show. The United States has 4% of the world’s population, but 22% of the world’s deaths due to the coronavirus. No nation has a higher percentage. Dig down a bit into the numbers and the situation is more shocking. The population of India is 1.38 billion, four times the population of the U.S., but India has a third of the coronavirus deaths that our country has.
The population of Indonesia is almost the same as that of the U.S., but Indonesia has experienced 6,759 deaths. New York, California and Florida each have more deaths than this less-developed nation.
In the future, historians and statisticians will have plenty of numbers to ponder. But numbers alone don’t answer the “why” question. Why is the most advanced country in the world failing this test of character and national will so badly?
Researchers at Columbia University offer part of the answer. They estimate that the U.S. would have 54,000 fewer deaths if President Donald Trump had acted just two weeks earlier. That’s a lot of deaths; that’s a lot of grief; that’s a lot of shame.
But I agree with the Republican pundit David Brooks, who points out that blame for our country’s miserable response to the pandemic goes far beyond the failure of government. The president forced no one to flock to large gatherings. No one in the White House prevented people from wearing masks when in public. No governor invited university and college students to return to campus early to party.
No, those are all decisions that some of our community have made and are making. The world is watching us in horror, a nation setting an example of what not to do. Sacrifice for the common good was once part of our national DNA, but the “selfish gene” now seems to be gaining control.
So far, it’s all bad news. But there is potential good news if we turn our attention to what other nations are doing to defeat the virus. Like us, no nation has a magic vaccine or pill, and no nation knows a secret that has eluded us.
What, then, is the big difference between other nations and us? Nations winning this battle have a unified response and a nationwide commitment to act for the good of the whole. Put simply, nations winning the battle against the coronavirus don’t have half their population wearing masks and practicing physical distancing, and the other half choosing to ignore the advice of health experts.
Last week on most major networks, Dr. Redfield, head of the CDC, looked directly into the camera and warned that this fall could bring the greatest health crisis in our nation’s history. Think about that—we are on the verge of the greatest health crisis in our nation’s history.
What would it take for us as a nation to prove him wrong?
