How Many COVID-19 Deaths Are Directly Attributable To Trump's Narcissism And Incompetence?

Many people woke up Monday to read that the U.S. had crossed the 5 million cases mark, just a bit over 2 weeks since passing the 4 million cases mark. As of this morning, the U.S. has 5,251,446 confirmed cases, 15,855 cases per million Americans-- more cases per capita than any developed country in the world-- by far-- Israel with 9,211 cases per million, Sweden with 8,210 cases per million and Spain with 7,915 cases per million being closest. The U.S. also has the most deaths-- 166,192 (another 569 yesterday)-- and more critical cases right now (17,589) than the other two worst-hit countries in the world, Brazil (8318) and India (8,944), combined. Brazil and India have horrible authoritarian rulers, Bolsonaro and Modi. Neither is as incompetent, venal and dangerous as Trump.

The Post also reported that more than 97,000 American school children tested positive in the last 2 weeks of July-- even before Trump and his GOP gubernatorial puppets like Brian Kemp started forcing unprepared schools to start reopening. Remember this photo from Paulding High School that we ran on Sunday? Suburban Paulding County (91% white) is northwest of Atlanta. In 2016 the county voted 44,646 (69.1%) to 18,004 (27.9%) for Trump. Two years later-- remember the "blue wave?"-- Paulding voted 40,784 (66.5%) to 19,959 (32.6%) for Brian COVID-Kemp over Stacey Abrams, while reelecting their rabidly right-wing sociopath of a congressman, Tom Graves. The county performed nicely for Graves-- R+36... and that was the bluest performance of any of the district's 12 counties. Now there are nearly 1,700 confirmed cases in the county and 22 deaths. Kemp announced yesterday he will not mandate mask-wearing in Georgia schools forced to re-open.

The day after we ran that picture The Post reported that "Now North Paulding High School is temporarily reverting to virtual instruction while the school is cleaned, after six students and three teachers tested positive. One student who took photos was briefly suspended and says she is facing threats from classmates."

Speaking with Fareed Zakaria on CNN Sunday, Bill Gates obliquely slammed the Trump Regime's incompetent handling on testing, noting that "No other country has the testing insanity, because they won’t talk about fixing it...because they just want to say how great it is... A variety of early missteps by the U.S. and the political atmosphere meant that we didn’t get our testing going. We are paying a pretty dramatic price, and not just in deaths. We also pay it in terms of the economic toll, which is up in the trillions." Gates fumed that the Trumpists incompetence has led to a slow and "worthless" testing system-- the one Trump gaslights as the best in the world.

It's still not too late. Winter is coming but, wrote infectious disease reporter Helen Branswell there is still a tiny window for the U.S. to save itself more unnecessary misery. If only every Republican in America went to Heaven, or wherever, tonight! That window of opportunity, she wrote, "is rapidly closing. And the country seems unwilling or unable to seize the moment. Winter is coming. Winter means cold and flu season, which is all but sure to complicate the task of figuring out who is sick with Covid-19 and who is suffering from a less threatening respiratory tract infection. It also means that cherished outdoor freedoms that link us to pre-Covid life-- pop-up restaurant patios, picnics in parks, trips to the beach-- will soon be out of reach, at least in northern parts of the country. Unless Americans use the dwindling weeks between now and the onset of “indoor weather” to tamp down transmission in the country, this winter could be Dickensianly bleak."

Public health officials had hoped transmission of the virus would abate with the warm temperatures of summer and the tendency-- heightened this year-- of people to take their recreational activities outdoors. Experts do believe people are less likely to transmit the virus outside, especially if they are wearing face coverings and keeping a safe distance apart.

But in some places, people have been throwing Covid cautions to the wind, flouting public health orders in the process. Kristen Ehresmann, director of infectious disease epidemiology, prevention, and control for the Minnesota Department of Health, points to a large, three-day rodeo that was held recently in her state. Organizers knew they were supposed to limit the number of attendees to 250 but refused; thousands attended. In Sturgis, S.D., an estimated quarter of a million motorcyclists were expected to descend on the city this past weekend for an annual rally that spans 10 days.

Even on smaller scales, public health authorities know some people are letting down their guard. Others have never embraced the need to try to prevent spread of the virus. Ehresmann’s father was recently invited to visit some friends; he went, she said, but wore his mask, elbow bumping instead of shaking proffered hands. “And the people kind of acted like, … ‘Oh, you drank that Kool-Aid,’ rather than, ‘We all need to be doing this.'”

Ehresmann and others in public health are flummoxed by the phenomenon of people refusing to acknowledge the risk the virus poses.

“Just this idea of, ‘I just don’t want to believe it so therefore it’s not going to be true’-- honestly, I have not really dealt with that as it relates to disease before,” she said.

...Epidemiologist Michael Mina despairs that an important chance to wrestle the virus under control is being lost, as Americans ignore the realities of the pandemic in favor of trying to resume pre-Covid life.

"We just continue to squander every bit of opportunity we get with this epidemic to get it under control," said Mina, an assistant professor in Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“The best time to squash a pandemic is when the environmental characteristics slow transmission. It’s your one opportunity in the year, really, to leverage that extra assistance and get transmission under control,” he said, his frustration audible.

Driving back transmission would require people to continue to make sacrifices, to accept the fact that life post-Covid cannot proceed as normal, not while so many people remain vulnerable to the virus. Instead, people are giddily throwing off the shackles of coronavirus suppression efforts, seemingly convinced that a few weeks of sacrifice during the spring was a one-time solution.

Osterholm has for months warned that people were being misled about how long the restrictions on daily life would need to be in place. He now thinks the time has come for another lockdown. “What we did before and more,” he said.

The country has fallen into a dangerous pattern, Osterholm said, where a spike in cases in a location leads to some temporary restraint from people who eventually become alarmed enough to start to take precautions. But as soon as cases start to plateau or decline a little, victory over the virus is declared and people think it’s safe to resume normal life.

...Fauci favors a reset of the reopening measures, with a strong messaging component aimed at explaining to people why driving down transmission now will pay off later. Young people in particular need to understand that even if they are less likely to die from Covid-19, statistically speaking, transmission among 20-somethings will eventually lead to infections among their parents and grandparents, where the risk of severe infections and fatal outcomes is higher. (Young people can also develop long-term health problems as a result of the virus.)

“It’s not them alone in a vacuum,” Fauci said. “They are spreading it to the people who are going to wind up in the hospital.”

Everyone has to work together to get cases down to more manageable levels, if the country hopes to avoid “a disastrous winter,” he said.

“I think we can get it under much better control, between now and the mid-to-late fall when we get influenza or we get whatever it is we get in the fall and the winter. I’m not giving up,” said Fauci.

But without an all-in effort “the cases are not going to come down,” he warned. “They’re not. They’re just not.”

How is any of that going to happen with the kind of leadership America has at the top? In a piece at Slate on Sunday, The Trump Pandemic, William Saletan, cataloguing a jaw-dropping and unrelenting series of failures, wrote that "The story the president now tells-- that he 'built the greatest economy in history,' that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it-- is a lie. Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He's personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths." I have no doubt that the number will be hundreds of thousands before he's driven out of the White House in January.