2020, Personal, Society

Diary of the Pandemic Year: Day 42

The Americans want to reopen things.

But of all countries, the US is worst hit in terms of total numbers: they will hit 1,000,000 confirmed cases sometime week and they will likely hit 50,000 dead by the day after tomorrow (April 24).

These numbers are not based upon population. They look a bit better when you factor that in but not much: 2,539 confirmed cases per million people (which is 3rd worst in the world if you raise the qualifier to tens of millions in population) and 142 deaths per million, which puts them behind much of western Europe.

Still these are real people’s lives, not statistics. You would have thought somebody in power in the richest country in the world might have done something to make their response the best, or the closest to that as possible, so that they had among the fewest cases and deaths.

Instead, they are now thinking of gradually opening everything back up again.

This isn’t a huge surprise, given the attitude towards science that so many people in power in the US have. (Science is left wing, or can’t be trusted or whatever.)

But it’s still likely to put more people in danger than necessary, given that, to the best of my knowledge, the country does not have the means to test enough people. And, let us not forget, part of point of physical distancing was to give them time to develop enough testing capacity.

It’s worth noting that polls don’t favour this but they’re doing it anyway. (At least they’re doing it right now. They change their minds so much who knows…)

And will it save the economy? Will people actually go out and shop and eat and drink and watch movies in theatres and get their hair cut and so on and so forth just because the government says they can now?

We’ll see I guess.

Three weeks from now, we’ll know whether or not this caused more death or not.

And we’ll have at least some idea whether or not it’s doing anything at all to help the economy.

Day 49 >>>>

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