China, epicenter of the pandemic, has 1.4 billion people. It had a total of 4,634 deaths from Covid19. Its economy is back to normal. It has no new cases.
The U.S. has now over 230,000 Covid deaths. It has thousands of new cases every day. One of them, I just learned, is my cousin Phyllis who has now been hospitalized.
China did not succeed because of coercion, although China certainly has a great deal of that. What China has that the U.S. does not have is a civil society of people who see themselves as part of a community. When China called for people to wear masks, they wore masks. Experts and medical personnel told them it would help. They listened. They didn’t turn to social media and crackpot commentators for their information; they turned to their scientists. In the meantime, our deaths are over a thousand a day. In a week we will have more Covid-19 deaths than China’s total.
Our defeated President is living in a fantasy world of denial. Millions of his followers also live in that world. Why are so many of our fellow citizens so stupid, so selfish, so uncaring about the community in which they live?
The statistics on China are from Ian Johnson, “How Did China Beat Its Covid Crisis?”, New York Review of Books (Nov. 5, 2020), p. 47.
No comments:
Post a Comment