The Left’s Coronavirus Blame Game Overlooks The Fact That Other Western Countries Did About The Same

[PeteS in CA]

The Left’s Coronavirus Blame Game Overlooks The Fact That Other Western Countries Did About The Same

https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/17/lefts-coronavirus-blame-game-overlooks-fact-western-countries/

Monday, New York magazine published a lengthy story titled “How the West Lost Covid.” The basic theme of the piece isn’t an upbeat one. Author David Wallace-Wells argues that when you step back and look at how various nations did responding to COVID in 2020, many of the western nations didn’t handle it very well. By contrast, some of the nations that did handle it best in terms of limiting the spread and the death toll were in Asia.

But this insight comes bundled with another point about the American experience of COVID. The constant (and ongoing) focus on President Trump as the cause of American failure really doesn’t make a lot of sense in retrospect because lots of other countries with different leaders failed about the same amount:

In the U.S., the story of the pandemic year has been dominated by the character of the president who presided over it so ineptly, often with such indifference it seemed he was rooting for the disease. But the problem with assigning Donald Trump all, or even most of, the blame for America’s suffering is that the country’s failure isn’t unique. In fact, before the arrival of vaccines, the American experience of the coronavirus was not exceptional but typical — at least among those European nations it typically considers its peers. And as the New Year has brought a new administration, experts in fields from public health to economics have grown more comfortable acknowledging that catastrophe was much bigger and deeper than the denier-in-chief and indeed much more “normal” than Americans outraged or mourning are likely to understand.

The metric of deaths per capita is crude, obscuring issues of demography and comorbidity, but by this basic standard the U.S. has suffered less than the U.K., Portugal, and the Czech Republic. It sits clustered with a number of other European nations — Italy, Spain, France — near the E.U. average. ...

  "denier-in-chief"

[Hoodat]

India made extensive use of cheap anti-parasitic drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.  They experienced significantly lower infection and fatality rates compared to Europe and the US.

[PeteS in CA]

As to the article's title, the West - actually, the world - "lost" Covid because it was in circulation in the West and elsewhere a month or two before the world knew it existed.

[goatprairie]

As to the article's title, the West - actually, the world - "lost" Covid because it was in circulation in the West and elsewhere a month or two before the world knew it existed.

Yes, whether countries zigged or zagged, it didn't make any difference. Britain enacted and still has much stricter lockdown rules than the U.S. Their infection and mortality rate is higher than ours. My wife regularly talks to one of her sisters who still lives in England. They can hardly leave their houses. Visitors to Britain must quarantine ten days at their own expense.
We had a trip scheduled there for June, but now that looks pretty murky. We're not spending ten days in a hotel before we go to a wedding reunion ceremony which is probably going to be cancelled anyway.