This is disastrous and shameful:
On Sunday, Britain recorded 650 new cases of covid-19. Japan recorded 373. Germany had 138. And South Korea, a model in handling the outbreak, identified just 44. Add those four numbers up and you get 1,205 new confirmed cases. The populations of those countries put together is roughly identical to the population of the United States.
And yet, Sunday, the United States recorded 58,349 new cases — by far the highest number in the world. Compared with those peer countries with a similar combined population, the new caseload in the United States is roughly 50 times worse.
Trump continues to argue — and his Fox News acolytes continue to parrot — the false notion that these differences are due to testing. They are not. Britain has performed 178 tests for every 1,000 residents. The United States, by comparison, has conducted 129 tests for every 1,000 residents. Crucially, while test numbers steadily grow in the United States, some other countries are now not keeping pace — not because they aren’t testing enough but because they just have fewer sick people to test.
The comparison is even more damning for the White House because the United States had some major advantages going into the pandemic. America is a rich country with low population density. While South Koreans are packed together with 529 people per square kilometer and Britain has 275, the United States has just 36. Arizona, which has one of the worst state outbreaks, has just 23 people per square kilometer. Those differences make physical distancing easier. Moreover, the dominance of car culture in the United States makes it easier to avoid crowded public transportation. And yet, due to an epic failure of Trumpian mismanagement, those advantages were squandered.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/13/trumps-performance-covid-19-looks-especially-bad-compared-with-rest-world/We have seen the sh*thole and it is the U.S.
