When you factor in a country’s wealth and resources, I think America’s exceptionalism becomes even clearer and more impressive!
Just because something is reproducible, doesn’t mean everybody can reproduce it. David Blaine magic tricks are reproducible. But not by me.
The US can’t reproduce being a small island country like New Zealand. The US can’t weld people’s homes shut for example, like China could. The US also wasn’t going to have the preparedness of South Korea with testing and contact tracing because it already had experience dealing with SARS (which was “lucky”, I guess?).
Please note I am NOT saying the U.S. couldn’t have handled this better. It could have.
What if a result was truly down to circumstance but was attributed to behavior? I imagine that would really muddy the waters…
However, people whose job it is to study magic tricks can reproduce it. The US isn’t a small island nation, and we can’t weld houses shut, but that doesn’t mean the lessons of closing borders, “bubbles,” and quarantine are completely out of reach. Having seen what ROK did with testing and contact tracing after SARS-1, the public health people could have been ready even in the US to implement widespread testing and tracing for SARS-2. The fact that the US chose not to learn from the experiences and successes/failures of others doesn’t mean learning was impossible.
I agree, it was not impossible. Just bloody unlikely. A country cannot “decide” to be prepared to do something like an individual can. The adage, “Smart people learn from their mistakes, wise people learn from other peoples mistakes” really don’t work at a country level. I’m sure there were people screaming we weren’t prepared enough for a pandemic. But it’s one thing to make a prediction, and another to have the power and influence to get get buy-in from everybody that needs to buy into it.
In any case, I don’t think it’s really fair to compare the U.S. to most other places. I think it works better to compare the U.S. to say, Europe, with the states compared to European countries. Maybe just the coastal states since no European country is as depopulated as the central states. Plus Europe is Western, so there’s going to be more similarity than, say, China.
Even if we have a stupid president, the states have some autonomous leeway in how they handle this, even though every state has a mixture of republicans and democrats. Some states are going to do poorly, and some well, as is the case in Europe. Still, Europe will have some advantages such as better border control (as opposed to US State border control), public attitudes, and varying abilities of countries to be authoritarian-ish.
Just like the universal mandate to wear pants or equivalent covering your crotch is unconstitutional?
Heck, there’s far less public health reason for pants than masks. To the degree the constitutional question turns on a “compelling government interest” (IIRC that’s the magic words), we’d sooner expect SCOTUS to overturn pants-wearing mandates than mask-wearing mandates.
Now that’d be a sight to behold. Crowds of folks with no pants wearing surgical masks. You’re welcome! 
I’m sure there are plenty of that online, due to Internet Rule 34, but I’m not going to search for it. As far as you know.
Countries have leaders, leaders are individuals. They decide, and the ship of state lays its course. In a country, you likely have multiple people with varying levels of power and authority, and they may cooperate or not, but every country has somebody with power and influence. In some countries, the people with power and influence acted to stem the tide (with varying degrees of success); in others, the people with power and influence decided to pretend the whole thing was a hoax that would go away by magic.
What’s up with Belgium? - they are topping the deaths/1M column. What are they doing/not doing to achieve those results.
Belgium has always been more generous about counting probable or suspected deaths than most other countries, e.g. people who died in nursing homes without getting an official diagnosis. So Covid-19 deaths may be somewhat overcounted in Belgium, but they’re probably undercounted everywhere else.
You essentially are. Frankly it reminds me a lot of 18tyh centuries Middle eastern literature )(yes the Europeans are doing really well in sciences management but they have no piety just replace piety with “human rights”/
A better argument would be that the US outbreak was a lot more widespread than Chinas. The US has had days where the number of new cases has approached Chinas total.
China only had big outbreaks in a handful of places and thats where they could and did go hard. They even had to bring in police from outside to enforce it.
There is no way they could have executed a Wuhan style lockdown over the entire country.
There is something else to include, Europeans mostly get the idea of some level of social responsibility and European politicians are generally on the same page.
In the US not so much, the national and local leadership are hugely fractured with a substantial number believing the political outcomes and a notion of constitutional rights somehow outweighs social responsibility - in fact I’d go as far as to say that plenty of Americans seem to think the virus should conform to their political outlook and are plenty willing to ignore any evidence to the contrary
Well this came out from Brazil yesterday, apparently the leadership seems to accept that there is an actual problem, instead of the ‘little bout of the sniffles’ that President Bolsonaro claimed.
Now the position has changed, instead of conflicting messages, utter denial, sacking of health ministers who advocated so9cial disatancinfg and other protective measures and undermining the health message completely, the Brazlian leadership has now found someone else to blame - and its everyone else for their poor discipline, yup, that’s right, it’s all the peoples fault, nothing to do with the leadership whatsoever, nothing to see here, nothing at all.
I rather expect that the US isn’t going to be far away in using this message, remember folks, it’s all your fault and not the people at the top.
That’s quite comforting isn’t it?
I am starting to rethink this a little. Yes, it’s pretty clear the US could/should have been able to do better, and we are the world leader in the raw number of cases. But let’s look at a few other stats (from Worldometers) regarding the USA:
- 8th in Tot Cases/1M pop (just behind Panama and Kuwait, just ahead of Peru and Oman).
- 10th in Deaths/1M pop (just behind Sweden and Chile, just ahead of Brazil and France).
- 18th in Tests/1M pop (just behind Russia and UK, just ahead of Cyprus and Lithuania).
I am not sure what this really tells us, other than depending on what stat you are looking at, we are either the worst or not. I think the more revealing stat could be the percentage of reported cases in the world vs the % of the world’s population the USA holds (25% of the reported cases, 4% of the worlds population - that is not a good look no matter how you slice it).
The heartbreaking part is that our outbreak was relatively contained in a few states. Had some of the relatively untouched states just done a better job of reopening (slower, with mask mandates, and better distancing guidelines) we could be one of the best performers. Instead, Florida, Texas, California, Louisiana, Arizona, etc., decided to reopen and have soft or even negative mask mandates, and now they are the hotspots, where NY, NJ, and CT, where it initially flared, is relatively quiet.
What’s going on with Peru? To my knowledge they’ve been quite strict on lockdowns, yet their numbers are atrocious.
Or maybe if the bulk of the international flights and visitors went to Miami and Dallas and Phoenix instead of New York, they could be the ones done with it and New York could be the one reopening too fast and not distancing.
No, because NY isn’t run by mask-denying, science-denying idiots.
I was wondering about Peru as well…
The plight of Peru illustrates the danger of COVID-19 to developing countries
Peru’s difficulties with COVID-19 result in part from the predominance of its shadow economy. More than half of the country’s non-agricultural workforce is believed to be employed “informally” in a way that generally involves a hand-to-mouth existence and lack of legal protections, yet generates an estimated one-fifth of Peruvian GDP.
Countries with large informal economies have been especially vulnerable because so many people were unable to stop working as the pandemic spread. At least, not without losing their sole source of income, because they lack protective benefits like unemployment insurance.
Worldometer has been my usual source since March. Back then when I sorted on either cases per million or deaths per million, the US was around 12th or 13th spot, just below the bottom of my laptop screen.
Since then it has steadily crept up the rankings. Leaving aside the Euroweenies and other small populations, most of those countries ahead of the US have stabilised on quite low case + death rates. Sadly, I don’t see evidence that the US first wave has run out of steam yet.