The United States has lost control of the Covid-19 pandemic, just in time to celebrate the 4th of July.
From the Washington Post:
The United States reported more than 53,000 new coronavirus cases late Thursday afternoon, surpassing Wednesday’s record of 52,789 cases, previously the largest single-day total since the start of the pandemic, according to data collected by The Washington Post.
Florida on Thursday reported 10,109 new cases of covid-19, marking a new single-day record for the state, which reported 6,563 cases on Wednesday. There were 68 new deaths, for a total of 3,718. It’s the 25th consecutive day that Florida has set a record high in its seven-day rolling average. Georgia, one of the first states to loosen restrictions, joined Florida and several other states in setting single-day records of new cases. Georgia reported 3,472, up from 2,976 on Wednesday.
(Updated: The figure is now 56,922, surpassing Brazil’s previous record day).
From across the pond, Thomas Chatterton Williams, an American writing for the Atlantic from France, where the daily cases have dwindled to manageable three-digit numbers, looks on in disbelief, and wonders whether Americans even realize how badly they’re doing against this virus:
I stared at my phone in disbelief when the musician Rosanne Cash wrote on Twitter that her daughter had been called a “liberal pussy!” in Nashville for wearing a mask to buy groceries.
That insult succinctly conveys the crux of the problem. American leadership has politicized the pandemic instead of trying to fight it. I see no preparedness, no coordinated top-down leadership of the sort we’ve enjoyed in Europe. I see only empty posturing, the sad spectacle of the president refusing to wear a mask, just to own the libs. What an astonishing self-inflicted wound.
***
I think of my father, whom I realize I may not see this calendar year or possibly even the next, and I picture him housebound indefinitely, unable to experience a pleasure so anodyne as bookstore browsing. I think of my mother, who is missing her grandchildren’s birthdays and watching them grow tall through FaceTime, and I imagine her leaving the house at dawn to arrive at the grocery store during its early hours for seniors. I am infuriated. I am also reminded once again of the degree to which so many other countries deliver what is, in real terms, a palpably higher quality of life by any number of self-evident measures.
***
I have lived in France off and on since the early 2000s, and it has been instructive over the decades to glimpse America’s stature reflected back to me through the eyes of a quasi-foreigner. If the country sparked fear and intense resentment under George W. Bush and mild resentment mixed with vicarious pride under Barack Obama, what it provokes under Trump has been something entirely new: pity and indifference. We are the pariah state now, but do we even see it?
And me, I just keep thinking of that scene at the end of “Easy Rider.”