The USA has just smashed through two million cases of coronavirus, by far the world’s highest raw number. This is 27.7 per cent of all cases worldwide, despite the USA having just 4.2 per cent of the global population.
The USA has also topped 6,000 total cases per million population. The only major highly developed countries (population above one million) with more are Qatar, Kuwait, Singapore, Chile and Spain. The USA has now overtaken Italy, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ireland.
Death rates soaring
If those milestones are not bad enough, the USA has just overtaken Ireland on the critical measure of deaths per million population. The USA has now lost 348 people per million, lifting it to eighth place on the global table. On current trajectories, it will soon overtake several more and, eventually, possibly all of them.
Avoidable deaths nationwide resulting from the failures of the Trump administration have now topped 110,000. This is based on the maximum death rate in those countries which took sensible, timely action. That rate is now 7.3 deaths per million. Had the USA adopted the same strategies as those countries, total deaths would also have been 7.3 per million maximum, which is 2,416. That is a tragic number, but arguably the unavoidable toll of the deadly infection.
Deaths above that number, however, are due to inaction in the face of a clearly advancing threat. That number in the USA as of today is 112,724. That is the legacy of Donald Trump and his Republican enablers across the country.
Contrast with other states
We saw here recently that three states had remarkably similar populations, land area, climates, weather, population densities, median population age and percentage of elderly citizens.
Those were Arizona and Missouri in the USA and Victoria in Australia. They all share free enterprise economies, high social development, advanced hospital and health care networks, democratically-elected state officials and all operate within a federal system, currently with a right wing national government.
The administrations in all three states watched the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, then in Europe and, eventually, its arrival on their continents. All three experienced their first death within days of each other.
But here is the difference: Arizona has had 332 deaths in the last twenty days, Missouri has had 204. Victoria has had none. See graph at the top here.
The explanation for this is that federal responses in the two countries have been vastly different. Australia acted decisively with travel bans, compulsory quarantining, truthful information, widespread early testing, contact tracing and global collaboration. The Trump administration did not.
A necessary step in ending the pandemic in the USA, therefore, would seem to be replacing the current failing federal administration with a competent one. Over to you, Republican senators.