Statistics help explain why the Covid-19 pandemic, which has claimed more than 125,000 lives, continues to rage in the United States. The most shocking and tragic statistic is that the U.S. could have prevented 84 percent of deaths and 82 percent of cases if we had started physical distancing two weeks earlier than we did, according to a recent Columbia University study. “We have the worst response of any high-income country in the world,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of Harvard Global Health Institute, told CNN on June 29.
More than 30 states currently report an increase in coronavirus cases, with record-breaking spikes in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and California. With less than 4 percent of the world population, the U.S. has already recorded an alarming 25 percent of the world’s pandemic deaths.
Despite these dire and accelerating trends, only 51 percent of Americans say they always wear a face mask when they leave home, while data shows that states with higher mask-wearing behavior have lower virus transmission rates. (President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, until recently, rarely have practiced physical distancing or wear masks, and both have downplayed their importance.)
These grim numbers have induced 14 states to pull back, or to pause their plans to re-open their economies.
The European Union considered our handling of the coronavirus so poor that the U.S. was left off its “safe list” for non-essential travel starting July 1. The EU’s data-driven reason - based on new cases over the past two weeks per 100,000 people - was that the U.S. suffered 107 new cases in mid-June, while the 27 European Union countries averaged only 16.
During historic crises, such as the Civil War and the Great Depression, Americans have always looked to our president for wise, honest, and compassionate leadership. Yet last November, an Economist/YouGov weekly tracking poll showed 53 percent of Republicans thought Trump was a better president than Abraham Lincoln.
However, a June 2020 national poll found that only one in three Americans believe Trump, who has made more than 19,000 false or misleading statements - averaging 16 a day - during his presidency. Even more shocking, the poll revealed only 49 percent of Republicans think it’s important for a president to tell the truth.
Presidential candidate Trump cynically intuited this about his political base when, at a 2016 Iowa campaign rally, he infamously boasted, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
A more uplifting aphorism about human nature came from Lincoln: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Between January 27 and May 3, Trump made 215 false and dangerous claims about the pandemic, CNN reported. For example, at a March 6 news conference at the CDC, he falsely claimed, “Anyone that wants a test can get a test.” And at a March 19 press briefing, Trump falsely claimed that the use of the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus had “been approved” by the Food and Drug Administration.
Trump hasn’t shot anyone, but his anti-science, inept, and mendacious handling of his response to the pandemic has killed thousands of Americans anyway.
Lincoln was right, though. Fewer and fewer Americans are being fooled, as a June 25 New York Times/Siena College poll shows. In six crucial swing states Trump won in 2016 - Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan - he is trailing Joe Biden by 6 percent to 11 percent. In recent national polls, Biden leads from 8 percent to 14 percent..
You can draw your own conclusions from these statistics.
Paul Fein
Agawam
