ROME (AP) – With the shown cases of coronavirus in the United States reaching five million on Sunday, across any country, the failure of the world’s toughest country to engage the scourge has been greeted with amazement and alarm in Europe.
Perhaps nowhere outside the U.S. is America’s bungled virus response viewed with more consternation than in Italy, which was ground zero of Europe’s epidemic. Italians were unprepared when the outbreak exploded in February, and the country still has one of the world’s highest official death tolls at over 35,000.
But after a strict 10-week national blockade, careful monitoring of new groups and widespread acceptance of mask mandates and social estrangement, Italy has a style of containment of the virus.
“Don’t you mind your health?” Patrizia Antonini, masked, asked a question about others in the United States as she walked with friends along the shores of Lake Bracciano, north of Rome. “You will have to take our precautions. Arrangement… They want a genuine closure.
Much of the disbelief in Europe is due to the fact that the United States has benefited from the time, European delight and medical knowledge to treat the virus that the continent itself did not have when the first patients with COVID-19 began to fill the units of extensive care. .
More than 4 months after the onset of a widespread epidemic, the United States has reached the five million mark, according to Johns Hopkins University’s existing count. Health officials estimate that the actual number is likely to be 10 times higher, or closer to 50 million, given the limitations of the evidence and the fact that up to 40% of all inflamed people have no symptoms.
“We Italians have seen the United States as a model,” said Massimo Franco, columnist for Corriere della Sera. “But with this virus, we discovered a very fragile country, with poor infrastructure and a non-existent public conditioning system.”
With the death toll of more than 160,000 people in the world, their politicized resistance to masks, and their expanding workload, European countries have banned American tourists and visitors from other countries whose growing number of cases travel freely to the bloc.
France and Germany now demand the arrival of travelers from “at-risk” countries, adding the United States.
“I am very well aware that this impinges on individual freedoms, but I believe that this is a justifiable intervention,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn said last week.
Mistakes have also been made in Europe, ranging from delayed blockades to inadequate protections for the elderly in retirement homes and critical shortages of evidence and equipment for medical staff.
Spain, France, Britain and Germany, the hardest hit, experienced an uptick in infections, with new cases exceeding 1,000 per day and cases in Italy that exceeded 500 on Friday. Some scientists say Britain’s most beloved pubs may have to close if schools reopen in September.
Europe in total recorded more than 207,000 virus deaths, according to Johns Hopkins’ count.
In the United States, the new instances are around 54,000 per day, an incredibly high number, even the country’s giant population. And while that number has fallen to a peak of more than 70,000 last month, cases are spreading in nearly 20 states and deaths are emerging in the majority.
On the other hand, at least for now, it turns out that Europe has a little more viruses.
“If fitness professionals had been allowed to work in the United States, it would have been delayed in March,” said Scott Lucas, a professor of foreign studies at the University of Birmingham in England. “But, of course, fitness and public skills professionals have not been allowed to act unchecked,” he said, referring to President Donald Trump’s common sub-subpoena of his own experts.
When the virus first appeared in the United States, Trump and his supporters quickly dismissed it as either a “hoax” or a scourge that would quickly disappear once warmer weather arrived. At one point, Trump suggested that ultraviolet light or injecting disinfectants would eradicate the virus. (He later said he was being facetious).
Trump’s common court cases about Dr. Anthony Fauci have made headlines in Europe, where the American expert on infectious diseases is a respectable figure. Italy’s main hospital, COVID-19, presented a task to Fauci if Trump fired him.
Trump defended the U.S. response, accusing China, where the virus was first detected, of U.S. upheaval and saying that U.S. numbers are very high because there is so much evidence. Trump ers and Americans who have refused to wear mask oppose any medical recommendations in this line.
“There’s no explanation for why to worry about an illness there,” said Julia Ferjo, a mother of 3 in Alpine, Texas, who “vehemently” objects to dressing in the mask. Ferjo, 35, teaches fitness categories in a giant open-door gym. Allows participants to wear masks.
“When you breathe so hard, I faint,” he says. “I don’t need other people to fall like flies.”
And fitness officials watched in fear as thousands of cyclists piled up Friday in the small town of Sturgis in South Dakota for an annual 10-day motorcycle rally. The state does not have a court order for the masks and many motorcyclists have expressed their contempt for measures to prevent the spread of the virus.
Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, who leads a COVID-19 remedy study team, reported such behavior as well as control of the virus in the country.
“There is no national strategy, there is no national leadership and there is no tension for the public to act in unais and put the measures into force together,” he said. “That’s what’s needed, and we’ve absolutely abandoned it as a nation.”
When you receive Zoom calls with opposite numbers around the world, “not everyone can see what they see in America and can’t get the words out of management,” he said.
Amid other countries’ disdain, Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien, newly recovered from an opposite fight against the virus, gave an upbeat symbol Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“We will fight like a demon. We’re running vaccines. We work hard to control fast and portable machines. Arrangement… We’re running therapies,” he said. “I am very inspired by our scientists and doctors, our lifeguards and the other people who are addressing this disease, and God blesses them all.”
Many Europeans point proudly to their national health care systems that not only test but treat COVID-19 for free, unlike the American system, where the virus crisis has only exacerbated income and racial inequalities in obtaining health care.
“The coronavirus has brutally exposed the vulnerability of a country that has been sliding for years,” Italian Massimo Gaggi wrote in his new e-book “Crack America” (Broken America), about the American upheavals that preceded COVID-19.
Gaggi said he started writing the e-book last year and then thought the name would be a provocative awakening. Then came the virus.
“In March, the name is no longer a provocation,” he said. “It’s obvious.”
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Bread brought from Boise, Idaho. AP hounds from all over Europe contributed.
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