How did we do with the Novel Corona Virus response?

How did the USA do in their response to the Novel Corona Virus Pandemic?

Let's try comparing some Apples to Apples.  Not easy, but I believe it is possible to a degree.

Globally, on 12/11/2020, there are 69,788,140 cases worldwide and there have been 1,585,727 deaths.  The population of the planet is 7,800,000,000 give or take a few undocumented births/deaths.  There has been a 0.89% rate of infection, and among those with confirmed disease, 2.3% have died.  These numbers are the best we have; there are countries in which appearances are more important than the health of their people and countries in which poverty and war are making any management of this pandemic impossible. 

(I've chosen a sample 8 of the countries-New Zealand, USA, UK, Sweden, India, Brazil, Canada and Japan, not at war and not run by dictators with an agenda of hiding their information)

New Zealand has done the Best at managing the disease.  It is a country with 4,822,233 people. They have had 2,092 cases and 25 deaths.  Their management was swift and tight.  They have a 0.0004% rate of infection in their population with a 2.3% of infected dying.  The country makes up 0.06% of the world population but only 0.003% of the world's Covid infections.  Good job, New Zealand!

Next best of the 8 is Japan.  Japan has a population of 126,476,461 people living on another smallish Island.  They represent 1.6% of the world population.    They have had 171,542 cases and 2,502 deaths.  That is a 0.14% rate of infection with 1.5% of those cases ending in death. That is only 0.25% (one quarter of one percent) of the world's cases.  Good Job, Japan!

India has had 9,818,364 cases so far with 142,417 deaths.  They have 17.7% of the world population with 1,380,004,385 people living there.  There is a 0.7% infection rate with a 1.45% death rate among those infected.  They have had 14% of the cases globally.  I am not familiar with the actions the country took, they may have limited international travel, or they may have started testing late in the game, but they seem to have had 3% fewer cases than their population expected.

Canada, land to our north, has had 442,069 cases with 13,109 death.  They have national health care so everyone can get tested and treated without delay or avoidance.  They have a 1.2% rate of infection (of the total population of the country) with a 2.97% death rate among those infected (higher than the global rate, but that may have to do with more testing and their faster response to the pandemic)  They represent 0.5% of the world population and 0.63% of the cases.  Maybe they didn't do that well after all.

Sweden, who actually started out pretty loose with their pandemic response has had 320,098 cases and 7,514 deaths.  The country makes up 0.13% of the world population with 10,099,265 people in their borders.  They have had a 3.17% rate of infection during this pandemic with 2.3% of those infected dying of the virus. Their infection were 0.46% of the world cases.  (so about 2.5x the rate of infection expected)

The UK has a population of 67,886,011 people.  They have had 1,787,783 case of Covid.  That is a 2.6% infection rate with 3.5% of those diagnosed as infected dying.  They represent 0.87% of the world population but 2.56% of the cases.  That is almost 3 times the expected number of the global numbers.  Populism and pulling out of the EU did not help on this.  

Now for Brazil, with 212,559,417 people it is 2.8% of the world population,  They have had 9.7% of the corona cases.  There has been a 3.19% rate of infection in the population with a 2.7% death rate among the infected.  That is over 3 times the expected rate of infection.  Having seen the poverty and infrastructure in the photos  from their cities, I'm not actually surprised.

 

I am surprised that the USA, has had 15,715,231 cases with 295,450 deaths while it calls itself the wealthiest nation in the world.  We make up 4.2% of the world population (331,002,651) but 22.5% of the world's cases.  We have a 4.7% rate of infection with a 1.9% death rate among those cases.  That is over 5 times the number of expected cases for our country.

While I am not betting the global rates are 100% (or even 75%) accurate, I am betting that our leadership, or lack thereof created our terrible response in comparison to other educated and wealthy countries---atrocious.

If the United States had responded as quickly and surely as New Zealand we would have had 13,240 cases and 158 deaths.  THAT is what a response could have done.  Our leadership failed and our people need better science education and critical thinking skills.

One:  giving the wealthy a heads-up (three months head start) so they could do some insider trading and score big before letting on to the public that there was a pandemic was pretty tacky and not the act of a moral and ethical political leader.  It actually seems more like the act of one of the dictators that I left out of the list because I didn't expect honest reporting.

Two:  Call the pandemic a hoax for three month, then keeping that up until the virus was spread far an wide while refusing to admit that people were dying of an illness was an act of childish disregard for the lives of those most at risk for death.

Three: turning a virus, a microbe discovered by scientist some time ago into a political cause and a human rights violation (you can't mask us or stop us from gathering or any of the things every country that kept their infection rate down and thus death rates down, did.  

 

And last but not least: throwing out the pandemic plan that taxpayer's money was spent on in the previous administration for developing ways to prevent, ebola, SARS, and odd strains of influenza (like the old spanish flu) from traveling through our population and decimating it, was an act of childish ego(exaggeration, it isn't an actual decimation, but by the end, few of us won't have lost a loved one).

We will have a vaccine available soon, with a 90% effectiveness rate.  But soon, for many of us will be a year from now.  And 90% is not 100%.  And we don't know about long term adverse reactions--and won't for 10 years.

Right now, we have masks (they aren't anywhere near 100% effective, but if used, correctly, WITH social distancing AND avoiding large indoor gathering (air recirculation becomes a viral load concentrator) they are better than nothing.  AND, what we have.

We have always had good handwashing and now better hand sanitizers, use them.  

So, find a good home alone hobby, and NO, the USA didn't do a good job at handling the pandemic and It wasn't God's will unless God likes New Zealand better than the rest of us.  

And saving the economy by ignoring the pandemic didn't fix the economy.  So we have a lot of sick people, a lot of unemployed people with their benefits running out, a lot of hungry people, and a lot of people about to be evicted. 

The billionaire class made out like bandits though. 

"People don't change"

 I've heard that my whole life, "People don't change", "they just get older and uglier", "they just get fatter", or worst, "they just learn to hide it better".

But, I've changed.  The person I was in my teens and twenties is so different than me now that I can't believe I was ever like I was back then.  

And, no, I haven't changed completely.  The seeds of who I am now existed all the way back in first grade. 

People in their thirties start noticing the changes.  They say things like,  "I guess I'm growing up" and less wonderful things like, "I guess I'm getting old".  Old should be older, but both are right.  

By forty, many of us were trying to grasp that, well, life might very well be half over.  No one was ID'ing us anymore in liquor store or clubs.  No one was commenting on how well you we were doing for our age unless we became POTUS.  People look askance at you when you say you are thinking about going back to school.  But you still feel pretty good.  Unless you have smoked or drank alot and sunbathed alot and have really bad genes, you probably don't have too many wrinkles.  If you aren't still in shape, you feel like you could get back into shape.  

By fifty, your definitely hitting middle age.  Clothing choices have changed with comfort and appropriateness to the situation outweigh the possibility of some great complements for the daring fashion statement.  No one tells you that your jewelry choices are too big or to bold unless you start wearing hello kitty necklaces or get your nose pierced for the next staff meeting.  And nobody asks about your kids, they ask if you have grandkids, even if your kid is only 8. A fancy sports car means midlife crisis not successful and fun.  Hitting the club every night means you're an alcoholic.  You think back to your teen years, and finally admit that you were no where near as together as you thought at the time.  (if you were really self-observant, you may have noticed this by your late thirties, but when you raised your own kids seems to have an impact on this bit of self-awareness).

By sixty, you are getting a little touchy about people treating you like you are getting old, over-the-hill, a fuddy-duddy, no longer capable of running with the young shakers and movers(if richer than god, you may not get this message, but they are thinking it).  You can fight it, try really hard to keep the gray out of the hair, the wrinkles at bay, the middle age spread from ruining the clothing lines.  You can learn the new lingo, and treat the people your age worse than the 30 year olds do.  Or, you can retire ASAP and do what you want.  

But when dealing with people older than you, at any age, never forget---they have been your age.  They have lived it.  Maybe they didn't examine it, preferring denial, but somewhere in there, they know something about what it is like to be you.

And, they know about change.  Self-change.

Some change is slow and hard to see;  may take years to grasp that the  anxious and self-conscious child you were is completely gone.

Some change is fast, a moment of insight, the knowledge that much as you want something, that is not realistic,that you can never alter yourself enough to succeed or that you can not actually change another person to fit your desires.  

And change is not the enemy.

There is nothing more pathetic than a person who is exactly the same person they were at 16.  They have not grown, not up, not more mature, not more self-aware.  Thank god that doesn't happen that often.

People change daily. 

Change is a sign of adaptability---that is the thing that makes us humans so good at surviving.

LIFE!

We have people griping about politicians trying to "give our money to people that aren't doing anything to earn it".  We have people griping about democrats trying to cancel student loans and make vaccines for the novel corona virus free to everyone.  We have people griping about homeless people making their towns look too ugly for tourists and griping about people trying to make them wear masks for a stinking "cold".

We have a lot of griping.

But what do we all have in common?

What do we have in common with our fellow countrymen (and women--for years, I thought that women were included in that, sort of like the editorial "we".)  

What do we all have in common with the people in other countries?

Life!  We are all alive.  We are all just trying to live our life; to survive as best we can.

And, we also share that with all the other mammals and birds and reptiles and amphibians and invertebrates and plants and fungus and bacteria and viruses.

Humans are not the only life.

We have been acting like we are the only life for several millennia, but acting is-well, it's acting.  Charlton Heston, Groucho Marx, Alanis Morrisette, George Burns and Morgan Freeman played God.  They were acting the part of God.  It didn't make them God.

And acting doesn't make us the only life.

Humans are just as dependent upon the other life on this planet as we are upon the sun.  

I remember a student in class arguing with the teacher about photosynthesis and plants and how important they are to human survival.  His stand was that they only ate meat and wonder bread.  His family was fine, so the teacher was wrong.  

Unfortunately, we have a lot of people with this attitude, or with the worse one, that God made all that other life for us to do with as we wished.  Some focus on good stewardship of the land, but seems to mean exploiting every plant, animal and mineral that can make our life easier.  

We spew insecticides, plastic waste, petroleum fumes, and manufacturing toxins into our air, land and water.  Destroying whole species while ignoring the plight of our poorer human lifeforms.  

And we gripe.

We gripe a lot.  

We ignore signs of intelligence and emotion in other lifeforms, thus making it easier to destroy them for profit.  It's like not naming our food but on a grander scale.

It's time for us to examine ourselves, not for signs of life, but for signs of humanity, of compassion, and humility.

We well-off Americans are not alone on the planet.  Everything is not ours to use.  

We can't survive without all of us, human, animal, plant.

But we can eliminate ourselves long before the sun goes out if we don't figure out what is actually important.  

LIFE!