U.S. PANDEMIC IS A HUMANITARIAN DISASTER

By Vincent Lyn

This Thanksgiving is going to be extra special because Americans will spread the disease to each other just like in the original — Europeans spreading disease to the Native Americans.

With new COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths accelerating at alarming rates, and health experts worry that the situation will get worse before the upcoming holidays. But you can be sure of one thing the disease will continue to spread and no doubt throughout our families.

The U.S. has now crossed yet another new milestone of quarter of a million deaths. Yes 250,000+ people have died from Coronavirus nationwide a number that is rapidly growing every day. This is a humanitarian disaster! Many hospitals are now running out of health care workers. More than 110,000 additional people in the U.S. are projected to die from COVID-19 in the next two months, according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Today marked the 7th straight day of record-high COVID-19 hospitalizations and the U.S. has topped 100,000 daily infections for at least fourteen days in a row.

The acceleration of community spread across most of the country is the most diffuse spread experienced to date. Both Texas and California have recorded more than 1 million COVID-19 infections. Hospitalizations, ICU admissions and ventilator use are rising in every single state. Some hospitals have reached full capacity and are sending patients away. And doctors are pleading for the public to get more serious about wearing masks, washing hands and physical distancing. But experts worry their warnings will fall on deaf ears as many Americans prepare for Thanksgiving — gatherings could easily spark new outbreaks.

It’s becoming more and more painfully, disturbingly clear by the day: The West has failed catastrophically in preventing COVID-19. The numbers are abysmal. They are, remarkably, even grimmer than they seem.

Why do I say the West has “failed”? It’s not just some kind of empty condemnation: I mean it in a rigorous and logical way. Pandemics are catastrophes, and so the way that we would and should think about failure or success is comparatively. Which societies have done better than others? What is the high bar, and what is the low bar, when we assess different nations?

The East is poorer than the West. It’s less developed. It doesn’t, on the whole, have nearly the same level of resources, talent, or money. What it does, have, though, is something that proved to be more important. The East is the place that’s pioneered what has become the Gold Standard Template for combatting COVID-19 — lock down early, test and trace, quarantine, give no quarter, and, crucially, try to wipe out the pandemic. Don’t just “flatten” the curve — but crunch it all the way down to zero. Note how strikingly different that approach is from the West — where in general, the idea was to flatten the curve, to some low level, decided by bureaucrats, but not crunch it right down to zero.

To examine that, we’d have to ask and answer the following question: if the West had acted like the East — its most successful nations — how many people would have died instead? If the answer is less, much less, then it’s fair to say that the West — despite all its historic advantages — has failed on COVID-19.

For example, how many people would have died in the U.S. if it had acted like South Korea? You could also substitute New Zealand, Taiwan or Vietnam, or an average of all the world’s most successful nations at COVID — it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the magnitude of the difference, and it’s absolutely tragic, horrifying, and shocking.

South Korea’s population is 51 million people. It’s had about 600 deaths. The USA’s population is about 330 million people. It’s had 250,000 deaths. At Eastern levels, it would have had 4,000 deaths. The UK’s population is about 67 million people. It’s had 51,000 deaths. At Eastern levels, it would have had just 780 deaths.

The West, as we all know, again, has far, far more in the way of resources and money than the East. South Korea’s GDP per capita is just $30K — that’s rich for Asia, but it’s still less than half of America’s $62K, for example. If anything, we should be discounting the East, not the West. But nevertheless — if you object to extrapolating the data, simply go ahead and double it. In fact, go ahead and quadruple it. You still don’t come close.

I describe it as horrific, shocking, and tragic because the numbers don’t admit any other conclusion. The number of excess people who have died across the West — versus the number of people who could have — is a number so high it’s actually mind-boggling.

All that needed to be done was for the U.S. to follow the East’s template of best practices — and even if it didn’t quite hit Eastern targets, even if its death rates were twice, thrice as high as the East, they still would have been more than 90% less than they should’ve been now. I feel like Americans gloss over the magnitude of how badly their part of the world has failed on COVID-19. They are not taking it in yet. They are either burying their heads in the sand, trying to look politely the other way, or simply blaming it on Trump. But a failure this colossal should and must be grasped and admitted and processed. What else, after all, is to stop it from going on. The U.S has failed catastrophically!

Easterners listen, and nod. While Americans try their best to ignore it. That should say something about how all this happened. Lamentably the U.S. is not absorbing the gravity and magnitude of their failure on COVID. Lockdowns weren’t often really lockdowns, how people continue to behave selfishly and irresponsibly, often egged on by government, justifying and fueling the pandemic.

America run by technocrats, seems to have completely given up on COVID-19 and placed its bet on a vaccine. But that’s not a good bet. Not only will it take time to vaccine a billion people, but there’s no guarantee that a vaccine will provide long-lasting protection in the first place from a Coronavirus. Meanwhile, all this seems to have done what the U.S. leaders want, which is misdirect attention, and blind Americans to how badly their government and society have failed on COVID. Even a vaccine tomorrow won’t change the fact that 90% of a quarter million people needlessly died.

At this point, the majority of the East thinks of the majority of the U.S. as brutal, callous, selfish, and stupid. That its values aren’t fit for the 21st century. That people are egotistical and narcissistic, unable to think of others. That it’s flunked the test of civilization, which is to protect the most vulnerable first. That it doesn’t care about life, only about piling up possessions. What does 90%, quarter of a million needlessly dead say?

What the East had that the U.S. didn’t wasn’t money, power, or resources. But something deeper. A set of values and ideas. Social cohesion, trust. Respect for vulnerability. A sense that each life matters, no matter how frail and defenseless. An ability to pull together in the moment of crisis. And the wisdom to look beyond the narrow American idea that money is the point of life — versus life being the point of money.

The U.S. by contrast, seems mired in attitudes of individualism, selfishness, narcissism, carelessness, and ignorance so extreme they can only be described as toxic. Americas failure on COVID-19 has been epic, immense, catastrophic. It will be remembered as something like a year of 9/11s. Despite the heroic efforts of nurses, doctors, volunteers — the U.S. didn’t seem to have the will or the way to care enough to really fight COVID. It didn’t crunch the curve down to zero — it never thought it had to, that it could get away with doing as little as possible — and so COVID exploded all over again. The numbers don’t lie. They are every bit as shocking and horrific as they seem, and then some way beyond even that 250,000+ are dead and counting.

The question we all need to ask ourselves is that are we going to begin to reckon with any of it yet, or is it all they want to go back to the way things were and forget about the cataclysm that never needed to be? And what does that shattering level of indifference say as it heads into an age of catastrophes — climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse, and the depressions, pandemics, and follies they’ll breed to come?

In summary let me make this completely clear a majority of Americans say they support face masks but we can all see what happens when noble intentions meet the real world, which is that they don’t seem to care, as a society, about each other at all anymore. And that is the central problem. There’s a failure of leadership, sure — but there’s also a failure of mass collective action of Americans who don’t trust or even like each other anymore as a society seemingly unable to act in ways of common decency or common sense during a pandemic, happily infecting their cities, towns, neighbors, kids, in the name of free-dumb.

That might sound harsh to you. What sounds harsh to me is another 150,000 people plus needlessly dying.

“I see a lot of people being like I would survive the Coronavirus. I’m taking my chances. The way I see it, Yeah. I’d survive it. But I might carry it to someone who wouldn’t. And that folks is the problem.”

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU!

Vincent Lyn

CEO/Founder at We Can Save Children

Director of Creative Development at African Views Organization

Economic & Social Council at United Nations

Middle East Correspondent at Wall Street News Agency