If you stick to the news that days, you’re inundated with stories about how The United States under Donald Trump Donald John Trump The Memo: The GOP seeks to detoxify Trump at the Harris Convention honors Women’s Equality Day in an editorial, calling for voting reformation to be broken with a precedent on the night of the MORE Array conference misunderstood the COVID-19 epidemic. Much of the rest of the world, we can be guaranteed, has controlled the pandemic strangely well. But America? An unprecedented “disaster,” says the Atlantic. “A single failure,” the New York Times sings.
But what if those judgments are wrong? What if they’re so focused on the absolute number of instances and deaths, they lose the maximum of apple sun shadows needed to make a proper assessment?
It turns out that this is precisely what happened with the reports on the US reaction to COVID-19. Indeed, when you compare the United States with other countries with political and economic systems (the fairest comparison), the United States is more middle-ranking than unheard-of outlier value.
Surprised? That’s who we are.
Like many Americans, we discovered that the Trump administration’s initial reaction to the new coronavirus was dull, derogatory, and (typical of Trump) politically exaggerated. And while there have been significant successes, such as the enactment of major economic stimulus plans with Congress, and an impressive increase in fan production, the appalling numbers were hard to ignore: COVID-19 deaths in the United States have accounted for more than 20%. COVID-related deaths worldwide. Single disaster, right?
Not really.
If you delve into the most sensitive numbers, you’ll find two vital mitigating points at play. First, the United States, with a population of 330 million, would have an absolutely higher number of deaths than almost any other country in the world. Hearing that the United States had 1,000 deaths on any ordinary day, while Costa Rica only had 1 five can be a smart copy for CNN; however, these figures are roughly the same, in relative terms, because Costa Rica has only a population of five million. .
Secondly, and more importantly, the list of maximum countries affected by the pandemic, measured by the number of deaths consistent with a 100,000 capita, is governed by Western capitalist democracies: seven from the highest sensitive 10 (and nine from the highest sensitive 14 (excluding micro-states in San Marino and Andorra) are liberal democracies ranging from Belgium to the Netherlands. The United States, in eighth place, is roughly equivalent to France and, in particular, descends that Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
Yes, some of these countries have experienced terrible early outbreaks that have distorted their overall mortality. But so has the United States: the most affected northeast still accounts for about part of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States. And although several countries such as Spain, Britain and the United States (and Australia) suffer from second-wave infections, mortality rates have fallen significantly, as in the United States.
In other words, the media narrative that Trump’s U.S. suffers from an exclusive COVID-19 flaw is incredibly misleading. It would be much more accurate to say that American-style liberal democracy, in general, has faced a much more complicated era of already involving the worst effects of the virus on their societies.
Indeed, this does not deserve to be so surprising when you consider that liberal democracies include greater openness and exposure to foreign industry and that it is as close to other countries. They also involve flexible private sector-based market economies that are not genetically suited to government-led “closures” or “blockades”; in fact, his herbal intuition, no more than america’s, must be open and fluid.
So while media leaders like to point out that the United States is doing worse than “almost every other country” in coronavirus control, this is an irrelevant point. Does anyone think that Rwanda, Uganda and Sri Lanka, the countries least affected by the virus, deserve to be models for managing complex trading economies? Of course not. And while some democracies, such as Germany and Denmark, have done a bigger task than others with their response, even they cannot escape the list of the 40 countries most affected.
Instead of being stuck in irrelevant global numbers, the United States and other liberal democracies will have to navigate recovery on their own terms. In fact, we believe that the same capitalist democracies that have a relatively more difficult time to handle the coronavirus will have a relatively greater good fortune to overcome it. This is because the same social and economic openness that creates vulnerabilities to the coronavirus will also provide the ingenuity and ingenuity needed to balance public aptitude and economic vitality well, and a return to full power.
Stuart Gottlieb is a professor of foreign affairs and public policy at Columbia University’s School of Public and International Affairs. In the past, he was a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter for the United States Senate (1999-2003). Bre’Anna Sonnier-Thompson is a political analyst in Louisiana.
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