"Instead of galvanizing the US populace to fight the pandemic, President Trump publicly dismissed its threat," the report in The Lancet explains.

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This is such a bullshit headline that hides the actual underlying problem.

40 percent of COVID-19 pandemic deaths in 2020 would have been averted if America's mortality rate was equivalent to other wealthy peer nations

What actions from the Democrat controlled government have changed course at all from Trump's policies? None.

Nothing would be different, except people would be somehow even more accepting of a half million dead in the USA.

    • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      They compared to the other g7 nations: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK. Japan is doing a lot of heavy lifting for the other ones (Japan's deaths per million are only in the double digits, everyone else is much worse by an order of magnitude).

      Using the data on Worldometer:

      The average deaths per million of Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Uk (no Japan) is 1154.2 and the US is 1455 which is 26% bigger.

      If we rank order the G7, the US is only the 3rd worst behind Italy and UK. France is doing a little better than the US. Canada and Germany significantly better, with only Japan being a complete outlier in it's exceptional performance.

      Do we think Italy or UK would have had less deaths if Trump were their head of state?

      • radicalhomo [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I dug a little more and the report seems to be looking at unnecessary deaths, among many other factors. America is also much less densely populated than Europe and I assume has some inherit advantages to fighting a pandemic.

        The report is here if you want to critique it, but it seems very accurate and is from one of the best known medical journals: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/fulltext

        Obviously Trump is not solely to blame for this though. I think Dems would have handled this somewhat better but still pretty shittily. Really the vast majority of deaths could have been avoided in most western countries if it weren't for the terrible systems as a whole. Vietnam is densely populated with 100 million people and literally only had 35 deaths.

        • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Interesting, I'll have to take a look at the full report.

          Thinking about it more, there's a going to be a lot of data coming out of this pandemic for public health researchers to look at.