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CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Monday criticized the U.S. reaction to coronavirus, saying other countries have been examples of how to keep deaths from the disease low.
“I’m seeing what kind of crisis our country has experienced that has never been as serious as the one that self-inflicted,” Cramer said in “Squawk on the Street.”
The host of “Mad Money” highlighted how the Covid-19 epidemic occurred in countries such as South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, all of which have less than one coronavirus death consisting of 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University. He also referred to Vietnam, which did not record deaths similar to Covid-19.
The U.S., by contrast, has 42.95 deaths per 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins, and leads the world in overall confirmed cases with nearly 3.8 million and total fatalities of more than 140,500 people.
“Those are big, big countries, and they’re faring so much better,” Cramer said, contending their adoption of face masks and development of contact tracing programs have been key reasons for containing the virus. “They’re also disciplined and we’re unruly. This may go down as us being, I’d say, a lesser-developed country versus those countries.”
America’s efforts to institute contact tracing systems have been a particular disappointment, Cramer said, describing them as “out of the picture in our country.”
Contact tracing involves figuring out who an infected person has been in close proximity to and then getting in touch with those people in order for them to take proper precautions. Public health experts say it’s an important strategy to prevent infections from growing into large-scale outbreaks.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease specialist, told CNBC last month that the search for coronavirus contacts in the United States is “going well.”
Cases of coronavirus and hospitalizations in the United States have increased in recent weeks following the reopening of local economies and reduced mitigation efforts in the past. Deaths in some parts of the country have also increased, experts say a greater understanding of how to treat the virus, in addition to youth infection, deserves to mean that mortality rates are not successful at pandemic levels.
State governors and other U.S. leaders in Washington, such as Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have stepped up calls for Americans to wear a mask to delay transmission of the virus. Some states have followed mandatory policies.
“I think if we can get everyone to wear a mask now, I think in four, six or eight weeks we could just have this epidemic,” Redfield said last week.
President Donald Trump has been in the masks.
However, Trump wore a mask at a public stop at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on July 11, after the bipartisan calls that have long resisted the appearance of that mask are vital to cutting off Covid-19 transmission.
During a stopover in May at a Ford plant in Michigan, the president was noticed at the factory without a mask despite state law and corporate policy required. Ford issued a saying that Trump was dressed in a mask in a personal assembly at the factory, but then got rid of him.
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Trump said he didn’t believe the United States needed a national arrest warrant.
“No, I need other people to have some freedom, and I don’t,” Trump said, before asking why some experts had begged the general public not to wear a mask before in the pandemic.
“Suddenly, everyone has to wear a mask, and as you know, the mask is also a problem,” Trump said, without offering the main points of the disorders he thinks cause the masks. “That said, I in the mask. I think the mask is good.”
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