4 ms·

The key thing is we (as in the government and it's people) could have handled this crisis differently. There's no good reason for the USA to have had a higher

The key thing is we (as in the government and it's people) could have handled this crisis differently. There's no good reason for the USA to have had a higher per capita death count than South Korea, Germany or other well resourced nation that is fully capable of dealing with large-scale crisis. This was a profound failure of leadership when it was needed the most. In the future, students in high school history classes will watch with their jaws hung open at clips of the president of the USA in 2020 free-associating doing and his insipid "air-accordion" gestures during the daily briefings at the peak of the crisis.

throwaway894345 6y ago
> There's no good reason for the USA to have had a higher per capita death count than South Korea There are some reasons which probably explain part of the gap: * South Korea and Germany are both smaller and more homogeneous, making them easier to govern * South Korea has a lot of recent experience responding to respiratory epidemics Moreover, while I would like to see the US at the bottom of a chart of deaths per capita, the US is in the same cohort as many western European countries including Sweden, the UK, Spain, and Italy. There's still plenty to criticize, but the media are pretty deliberately choosing metrics that are designed to exaggerate the US's handling of the crisis, specifically by ignoring per-capita death rates. I'm sure they're just doing this to get Trump out of office at all costs (ends justify the means), but they risk playing right into Trump's hand (and in any case, they certainly contribute to a broader atmosphere of fake news and partisanship).
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  > ...the media are pretty deliberately choosing metrics that are designed to exaggerate the US's handling of the crisis... "The media" would have had far less grist if Trump hadn't been astonishingly incoherent and outright lying much of the time. I think it's not a coincidence that a good number of nations with delusional tin-pot autocratic wannabee's have been hit very hard by covid-19.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    > "The media" would have had far less grist if Trump hadn't been astonishingly incoherent and outright lying much of the time See, that's exactly the thing. Trump is absolutely a liar and incompetent and lots of other things, but it doesn't follow that the media has to lie to exaggerate these attributes. If the media contented itself to report the facts, they would expose Trump's lies and incompetence, the would preserve their own credibility, and they would reduce the overall volume of disinformation, partisanship, and other kinds of toxicity. Instead they play into his hand, presumably because there's a market for that kind of grifting.

throwaway894345 6y ago

> There's no good reason for the USA to have had a higher per capita death count than South Korea There are some reasons which probably explain part of the gap: * South Korea and Germany are both smaller and more homogeneous, making them easier to govern * South Korea has a lot of recent experience responding to respiratory epidemics Moreover, while I would like to see the US at the bottom of a chart of deaths per capita, the US is in the same cohort as many western European countries including Sweden, the UK, Spain, and Italy. There's still plenty to criticize, but the media are pretty deliberately choosing metrics that are designed to exaggerate the US's handling of the crisis, specifically by ignoring per-capita death rates. I'm sure they're just doing this to get Trump out of office at all costs (ends justify the means), but they risk playing right into Trump's hand (and in any case, they certainly contribute to a broader atmosphere of fake news and partisanship).

crispyambulance 6y ago
> ...the media are pretty deliberately choosing metrics that are designed to exaggerate the US's handling of the crisis... "The media" would have had far less grist if Trump hadn't been astonishingly incoherent and outright lying much of the time. I think it's not a coincidence that a good number of nations with delusional tin-pot autocratic wannabee's have been hit very hard by covid-19.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  > "The media" would have had far less grist if Trump hadn't been astonishingly incoherent and outright lying much of the time See, that's exactly the thing. Trump is absolutely a liar and incompetent and lots of other things, but it doesn't follow that the media has to lie to exaggerate these attributes. If the media contented itself to report the facts, they would expose Trump's lies and incompetence, the would preserve their own credibility, and they would reduce the overall volume of disinformation, partisanship, and other kinds of toxicity. Instead they play into his hand, presumably because there's a market for that kind of grifting.