One of the finest achievements of American cinema, Team America: World Police, features a group of heroes who have one yardstick for determining success or failure: the number of terrorists killed. The movie opens with the team declaring victory over a small group of jihadis in Paris. They’re satisfied with their results, but the citizens of Paris are unhappy about all of the city’s monuments being destroyed.
Now that our cities are in ruins, I’m wonder if the same logic has been applied in 2020 regarding coronaplague. Americans now care about one thing only: the number of people killed by Covid-19. It doesn’t matter how old or sick these people were before coronavirus got them. Every life that can be saved from Covid-19 is worth an unlimited amount of (a) deaths due to withheld non-Covid health care, (b) family and life destruction due to unemployment, poverty, and kids kicked out of school and imprisoned in small apartments with a miscellaneous collection of adults (“Fewer than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage.”), (c) dollars borrowed that the children being denied educations, playgrounds, and friends will have to pay back, etc.
Isn’t it the same in Europe, you might ask? No! They took a more balanced approach. Yes, coronaplague was bad, but as soon as they figured out that schools weren’t primary drivers of plague, they reopened their schools (except in Sweden, where the schools never closed). Maybe the Europeans will suffer a handful of additional Covid-19-tagged deaths are a result, but they are looking at more than a single number to measure how their nations are doing. How about India? A brief lockdown followed by a swift reopening. Brazil? “sorry for all the dead, but that’s everyone’s destiny.” (even Trump can’t say stuff like this!)
Readers: Was Team America prescient regarding our national tunnel vision? We have a slightly lower death rate nationwide compared to Sweden (where I live in Massachusetts, though, the death rate is more than 2X never-shut Sweden’s, as we enter Month 4 of shutdown).
Slightly lower death rate in the US than Sweden, Phil? Hmm, looking here:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality,
I see Sweden’s deaths/100K people is 46.32. The US’s is 34.14.
Not sure I would consider that “slightly lower”.
Paul: I think you’re proving my point. (46.32-34.14)/46.32 is about 26 percent. The U.S. rate TO DATE is 26 percent lower than Sweden. But since we shut down and did a major curve flattening (at least by our own account), that 26 percent difference should evaporate over the coming 6-9 months.
So you’re an American and you look at this 26 percent difference, likely to evaporate soon enough if we believe our own March 2020 “flatten the curve” dogma, and say “We are in a whole different world of goodness compared to Sweden”. The Swede, on the other hand, might look at our ruined cities, our transition by the tens of millions to unemployment, poverty, and alcohol/opioid addiction, and our deaths from shut-down health care, and say “This is not the kind of success of which I am envious.”
@Philg – Thanks for your reply. Yes, it will be interesting the next 6-9 months to see if that difference evaporates. I have been informally following the differences the past 6 weeks or so, and it seems to me it has only gotten bigger (but I could easily be wrong).
You’ve probably seem Tomas Pueyo’s latest analysis on Sweden. He’s not quite the FanBoy you are 🙂 :-).
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-should-we-aim-for-herd-immunity-like-sweden-b1de3348e88b
One of the finest achievements of American culture is the song, ‘America F*** Yeah’
“… in Europe … as soon as they figured out that schools weren’t primary drivers of plague, they reopened their schools…”
In Ireland the schools remain closed.