Day 1,185: Trump on coronavirus response: U.S. is ‘talk of other nations’ [in a good way]

Donald Trump continued his trend of giving deeply false and unhinged press briefings on Saturday. Short of facts, Trump relied on rhetoric and conversations that seem to emanate from thin air.

Trump declared that the U.S. is “the talk of other nations.” Impossibly, Trump actually meant it as a good thing.

The U.S. lags behind on tests and surges ahead on deaths. Despite being the wealthiest nation in the world from a monetary and human capital perspective, the U.S. was woefully underprepared and had an incredibly slow response to the pandemic thanks to Trump.

From a per capita standpoint, as of last week, Germany could test more people in a week than the U.S. had tested since the outbreak began.

And yet, the U.S. has had a plodding rollout to coronavirus testing. With Donald Trump’s Thursday announcement that the U.S. has tested a total of two million people, the U.S. has tested 0.6% of its population over the entirety of the outbreak. By way of comparison, Germany can test about 500,000 people, or 0.6% of its population, every week.

From a raw tests perspective, the U.S. and South Korea saw their first case on the same day, January 20. The U.S. — with over six-times the population — didn’t pass South Korea in total number of tests administered until the end of March, more than two months later.

From a number of mortality viewpoint, the U.S. has currently seen 36,773 people — children, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends, coworkers — die from the disease. That is 14,000 people higher than the next nation on the list, Italy. (Even if China is wildly under-reporting their own figures, as many people believe, the U.S. has still lost nearly 37,000 people to a disease Trump said would be nearly gone six weeks ago.)

On top of all that, the U.S. has a case-fatality rate in the middle to upper part of the pack of nations reporting data.

With other countries seeing real tapering off of daily death tolls, the U.S. hasn’t.

There’s isn’t a single nation that is jealous as to how the U.S. has botched its head start and are projecting tens of thousands of more deaths from the disease. Compared to its peers, the Trump-led response has been atrocious in every sense of the word.

1,185 days in, 277 to go

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