At every single opportunity this President makes the spread of the virus easier rather than harder and then later on he will reverse the position because he thinks its a new, great and beautiful idea - and always three or four months after it would have been most effective, leaving the US continually striving to achieve any sort of control.
It’s as if he cannot contemplate the idea that others might have come across the mitigation before he did and somehow using ideas from others reflects badoly on himself. He has not had one single independent and novel effective idea in relation to this virus although he had had quite a few novel, stupid, inneffecitve and downright dangerous ones.
A little back-of-the-envelope figuring here…
While the US was active in WWII, there were about 412,000 combat deaths - soldiers and civilians - per Wikipedia. This was over a period of 44.25 months, from December 7, 1941, through to VJ day.
So far, since the first known COVID death in the US (March 4), it’s been not quite 5 months. Per Worldometer, 158,365 Americans have died.
So, in WWII, an average of 9,300 Americans died per month, while COVID has killed roughly 31,700 per month.
18,236,624 total cases
692,819 dead
11,446,952 recovered
In the US:
4,813,647 total cases
158,365 dead
2,380,217 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
My state, Nevada, passed the 50,000 confirmed case mark today, making us 26th in the nation for cases. 12 states currently have more than 100,000 infections and one, California, has more than 500,000. Florida will join them in by Tuesday. Texas won’t be far behind.
That is absolutely not the reason that he reverses his position. It is because the crap he pulled had such a terrible fallout that he could not effectively blame on Obama. And his “novel, stupid, ineffective, and downright dangerous” ideas aren’t really his either. He’s just pushing other whacked-out nutjob conspiracy theorists’ crap as so amazingly clearly demonstrated with the demon sex doctor of late.
For perspective, the US had a population of ~132M in 1940. So WWII had a total combat death toll of ~3100 deaths/million. The covid death toll currently stands at 470/million.
You would probably not have heard anything about these carckpot ideas and the really stupid people might not give them as much creedence if he did not give those ideas legs.
The only reason he does reverse these ideas is almost certainly because of feedback from the main Republican movers in the background and perhaps his poll rating monitors.
I get the feeling that from time to time he gets told in no uncertain terms to ‘wind his neck in’ by various backers - to me those backers control him to a degree, they let him loose and are not too bothered so long as it suits their agenda - but when he steps out of their remit they bring him in pretty sharpish. Those backers are just like bad dog owners - they don’t care if it craps everywhere, they don’t care if it barks all night and annoys the neighbours but, the moment it tries to shag the sofa they are all over him.
You calculated the death toll per million people; @galen_ubal calculated the death toll per month. Why not combine them?
By my reckoning, WWII had a death toll of 72 deaths per month per million people. So far, Covid-19 has had a death rate of 96 deaths per month per million people.
With all due respect I don’t think it’s a comparison useful for meaningful discussion. WWII purposely sent men in the prime of their life to death by the thousands. Covid is a disease we’re trying to control somehow. Why compare them? Why ignore the order of magnitude difference in per capita deaths? It is just not where you should go with your argument, imho.
We should, and can be trying to control it but the leadership at the top has been doing a very bad job of it. That’s what makes it comparable to a war, where there is a pretty direct link between how good you are doing and how many casualties you are taking.
Whereas with other things such as cancer, and heart disease, if we knew how to nearly wipe them out by a concerted effort to remain vigilant we would have already. Any one step or misstep there, unlike in times of war or plague, will not potentially cost thousands of lives in such a predictable manner.
It’s kind of interesting… does it have to be “useful”? It introduces some kind of perspective that may be thought-provoking to some people and utterly distasteful to others.
