Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
Is this Cuomo's fault, or are you claiming that because some other countries failed, that the USA being one of the worst in it's class despite being historically the most prepared and proactive is acceptable to you?
Just to show how much of an outlier the US is from better performing rich, developed countries, here are covid deaths per million people (adjusted for population) since the pandemic began:
Japan: 21
Australia: 35
South Korea: 12
Norway: 74
New Zealand: 5
Taiwan: 0.3
US: 948
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The U.S. was not the most prepared for covid because, neither at the federal level, nor, more importantly, at the state level, it had not maintained the required stock of supplies. And that lapse predated Trump and there is no evidence that Trump was briefed about it--rather it seems to have been an atrophy of neglect. And testing was delayed because of the built-in hurdles of regulation and protocol of the CDC. Trump had to assert a legal bypass of the regulatory and protocol demands in order to bring preparation and execution up to speed, as well as correcting the supply shortage. Which he did, but time was, systemically, lost.
And comparing those countries to the U.S. is meaningless if you don't consider the extreme differences in law, demographics, and culture between them and us.
South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are much smaller landmasses with extremely homogenous populations which are culturally far more ready to unquestioningly do the will of their governments. And their governments are far more centralized under a basically unitary legal framework. The other countries, to varying degrees, have similar differences with us. We have a sprawling landmass populated densely in some places and loosely in most others by people of different cultures, ideologies, and levels of willingness to do what government asks or recommends. And each place, whether state or city, is a separate fiefdom united in a federated system which limits and encumbers the national government from dictating uniform types and levels of action.
Trump did his part well and more energetically than many of the other units of our federation. With the political division at all levels, including opposition to, and ridicule for, most anything he did or proposed, he did amazingly well. For instance, he was painted as some kind idiot for saying we might have a vaccine ready to distribute before the end of the year.
He was right, and was instrumental in getting that done.
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