When the story of this third decade of the 21st century is told ( if it ever will be), the level of the United States’ response to a worldwide pandemic will stand out as one of its worst failures. The laggard and selfish response of a significant industrialized power, who had at its disposal, great tools to prevent death and suffering, chose to avoid doing so. Ever since I first became aware of where COVID was going, which was when I was in Japan in 2020 and Abe-san was announcing the closure of the schools, etc. It has been amazing to me how much we as a people lacked the patience to see any meaningful effort through.
Now two years later, and almost 900,000 Americans dead ( more if you accept the proposition that the true death toll is much higher), and hospitalizations have strained the American medical system to the near the breaking point, I remain amazed at the callous indifference of so many of my fellow citizens. Prominent pundits are going on T.V. to repeat the same tired old line, “We are done with COVID.”
Well, perhaps you may be tired of the pandemic, but COVID is not tired of you:
I wrote in another forum, “The problem with the ‘let it rip’ approach is that it discredits proven public health measures that will be needed when the next and probably more deadly pandemic comes our way.” Nonetheless, there is a big part of America is willing to declare victory even while the enemy is still on the field, undefeated:
Probably the most troubling statistic of the pandemic is that after a year, a significant portion of the U.S. population remains unvaccinated – and is so self-centered that it wants to demonstrate for the right to kill even more Americans.
So, to protest a life-saving vaccine, anti-vaxxers irresponsibly gather, many with vulnerable children, blasting the music of another unvaccinated person who just died of Covid. You can’t make this sh*t up!
The United States remains only 63% fully vaccinated with plenty of vaccines available.
In a very perceptive Twitter thread, Joy-Ann Reid points out the price that we pay for not being more diligent and trying to find a middle ground the way other countries did:
That’s the money quote right there- and one I remain shocked and saddened by because its a 100 percent true. The common good and doing good for others is just too damn hard.
I agree with her. I honestly thought the American people were better than this level of selfishness.
So here we are. As with so many things, there are proven solutions out there, but we make a conscious choice to ignore them because we lack the patience to see them through to a logical conclusion.
I’ll let Dr. Craig Spencer conclude:
“In the U.S., more people died of Covid in the past week than died of Ebola during the whole 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic. Maybe it’s me, but the slew of ‘the pandemic is essentially over’ articles seem a bit premature.“
What she said.