“America is like a ship at storm, and the captain has decided to go play golf.”
Recently, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University, Lawrence O. Gostin, gave voice to this lament over the United States’ failure to control the COVID-19 outbreak. He warned that the U.S. will face its worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic within the next three months.
It’s hard to imagine what that would look like. The U.S. is already on the verge of losing control of COVID-19. In the past week, the average daily number of positive cases has exceeded 160,000; compared to two weeks ago, the average has increased by 77%. As of Nov. 18, the number of COVID related deaths has exceeded 250,000; this was described by CNN as a “horrific milestone.”
What especially pains people is that as of last week nearly 1.04 million children and adolescents tested positive for COVID-19. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Sally Goza, issued a statement saying, “ We haven’t seen a virus flash through our communities in this way since before we had vaccines for measles and polio.”
Assistant Secretary for Health Brett P. Grior acknowledged that the U.S. is in the midst of an “absolutely dangerous situation.”
However, the warning signs haven’t been enough to sway current power holders in the U.S., who seem to only be concerned with political entanglements. Recently President Donald Trump resorted once again to old tactics of blame shifting, wrongly dubbing COVID-19 the “China virus” on social media. Delusional thinking that ignores the steep rise in the threat to public health, and is numb to the lives and safety of citizens, will only cause this man-made disaster to snowball out of control.
Let’s go ahead and give U.S. policy makers some scientific facts: China was the first to report COVID-19 cases, but that doesn’t mean that it originated from China. A growing number of news reports and investigations show that traces of COVID-19 have been found in many other countries around the world, many of them dating earlier than China’s.
For instance, researchers in Italy recently published a peer-reviewed paper in Tumori Journal noting the presence of CoV-2 receptor-binding domain–specific antibodies in the blood samples of 959 asymptomatic individuals in September of last year. As a result, researchers inferred that COVID-19 had already been spreading in Italy as of Sept. 2019. In an analysis, Francis Collins, president of the National Institutes of Health, found that based on COVID-19’s ability to adapt to human cells it’s possible that it could have been spreading undetected for quite some time.
The origin of COVID-19 is a question that needs to be answered by science; any conclusions should be backed by thorough investigation by scientists and medical experts. No one has the right to politicize investigations concerning its origin and they certainly shouldn’t apply labels. However, under the anti-intellectualism of the U.S. government some people are shamelessly more concerned with keeping up appearances rather than addressing the reality of the situation.
Bloomberg News recently published an article written by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, titled “Covid Is Increasing America’s Lead Over China.” It states that even though the U.S. has botched its response to COVID-19, it has proven that, “America as a nation can in fact tolerate casualties.”
As soon as this statement came out, the public was in an uproar. College professors are the cream of U.S. society, but Cowen’s crass and narrow-minded statement left people speechless. Presenting a false reality, he calls the tragedy occurring within American society a display of “fearlessness”* against death. How absurd is this?! Even more startling, Cowen concludes that the “American people are not weak,”* writing that such a fact would make China “cautious in formulating its military strategy against the U.S.”* It was so shamelessly brazen, it’s no wonder that some American netizens used the smoking emoji to describe the level of delusion displayed in this article.
On Nov. 19 AP News published an article shockingly titled “’Tired to the bone’: Hospitals overwhelmed with virus cases.”
However, the passive laissez-faire attitude displayed by U.S. leaders as well as their shameless handling of affairs is even more shocking. Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that “countries that are letting the virus run unchecked are playing with fire.”
When will the United States’ cold-blooded policy-makers finally mend their ways? (International Rui Ping Commentator)
*Editor’s note: These quotes, accurately translated, could not be verified.
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