Opinion | How America could have fought covid-19 better - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...b-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html
us advantage assets pandemic response metric success failure comparative
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Back in the spring, I listed many ways that the United States was uniquely well-positioned to fight this virus
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Americans generally demand a lot more personal space than people in other countries; we stand farther apart, our houses are bigger and our public spaces tend to be larger and better ventilated than those inEurope. We drive rather than taking mass transit.
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We are richer and can afford to spend more on virus-proofing our homes and businesses — or paying for the ones that can’t be virus-proofed to be closed until the pandemic ended.
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We have more intensive care beds per capita, more equipment and more pricey specialists than almost anywhere else. We have a fantastically innovative biotech sector.
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America’s weather was more favorable to fighting covid-19 because more of our landmass falls in southern latitudes where it’s comfortable, for most of the year, to spend time outside.
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we had time to figure all that out, because Europe got hit hard first, giving us a valuable preview of horrors to come. That bought us priceless extra days
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Sure, America doesn’t have the absolute worst death rate in the industrialized world — not yet, anyway
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Either way, we’ll still be doing much worse than we could have — and much worse than we should have. And I mean all of us, not just President Trump.
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everyone, left or right, who turned this into a political battle with their fellow Americans, rather than a desperate fight our country needed to unite to win.
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Yes, Trump was by far the worst bungler in this whole affair. But there is plenty of blame to go around:
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I include myself in that number. I think of all the times I lost my temper with covid skeptics, even though I knew it was counterproductive, and I regret every one of them.
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I look back at my columns and wonder if I should have advocated for less intrusive policies that might have garnered broader support, or if I would have convinced more people if I’d evinced a little more humility in my conviction that America needed to take radical action immediately.
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I’ll always wonder: How many people could we have saved if everyone, from the president on down, had acted as if saving American lives from a deadly virus was the most important thing we had to do this year?