Yes, I do feel a little guilty dumping all this on you… but some of us feel safer when we have more information. Don’t read these posts if they’re just going to further upset you!
.@NicolleDWallace on U.S. coronavirus response: "We have made the easy things hard, which makes the hard things impossible. The easy thing was putting on a mask … And the hard things, getting legislation done, it shouldn’t be hard in a moment of crisis."https://t.co/1wc4kKT16w
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 8, 2020
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Interactive piece from the NYTimes, “The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus”:
… When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations, like Bahrain and Oman.
As in several of those other countries, the toll of the virus in the United States has fallen disproportionately on poorer people and groups that have long suffered discrimination. Black and Latino residents of the United States have contracted the virus at roughly three times as high of a rate as white residents.
How did this happen? The New York Times set out to reconstruct the unique failure of the United States, through numerous interviews with scientists and public health experts around the world. The reporting points to two central themes.
First, the United States faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic. It is a large country at the nexus of the global economy, with a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions. That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes — including higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy — than in most other rich countries…
The second major theme is one that public health experts often find uncomfortable to discuss because many try to steer clear of partisan politics. But many agree that the poor results in the United States stem in substantial measure from the performance of the Trump administration…
Some Longer Pandemic Reads — *If* You Want ThemPost + Comments (60)