With 65 days remaining before the end of the disgraceful failed pResidency of the impeached loser Donald J. Trump, one of the many many dark stains on his legacy will be the massive toll of unnecessary deaths suffered by Americans due to the magical thinking and inept response of the pResident.
On October 21, 2020, The Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University released a report assessing the human cost here in the US resulting from the Trump administrations failure to responsibly respond to the Covid-19 pandemic ncdp.columbia.edu/....
That report pegs the minimum number of premature or unnecessary deaths in the U.S. resulting from our failure to wear masks, contact trace, isolate and maintain social distance at 130,000. The upper limit of that estimate of premature or unnecessary deaths as of October 2020 stands at 210,000.
Those numbers represent U.S. lives lost to Covid-19 that could have been saved had we simply followed the basic public health mitigation measures employed by South Korea, Japan, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada. Our 130,000 preventable Covid-19 deaths amount to more than the number of lives lost each year in the U.S. to Breast Cancer, Car Crashes and Opioid Overdoses — combined.
As the case positivity rate and daily case count have increased dramatically in the weeks since that Columbia University report, we need to brace ourselves for the fact that during the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the death toll will exceed 420,00, the number of all U.S. lives lost from combat and non-combat causes in the four years of WWII en.wikipedia.org/....
Trump’s mismanagement of Covid-19 may ultimately result in this becoming the most deadly pandemic in US history, surpassing the 675,000 lives lost during the great flu pandemic of 1918-1919.
Of course Trump will go to his grave accepting no responsibility and suffering no guilt. He will surely take credit for the vaccines when they become available and will ignore the human suffering and losses. Trump will not always be able to charm reality and bend public beliefs to his advantage. History will one day judge him harshly. In the space between now and history, we all share in the responsibility to do the little things we can do to be safer. Be vigilant and take personal responsibility — avoid crowds, wear masks, stay home, wash our hands, assist in contact tracing, get tested when possible and to faithfully bear witness — to push back against those who would have us believe that no course of action could have altered the trajectory or grim outcome , the vast unnecessary losses that Trump’s incompetence has led us toward.