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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThose missing four to six weeks are likely to go down in the definitive history as a cautionary tale
When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
On the very same day, 5,000 miles away in Asia, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in South Korea. The confluence was striking, but there the similarities ended.
In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.
Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Koreas disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
Those missing four to six weeks are likely to go down in the definitive history as a cautionary tale of the potentially devastating consequences of failed political leadership. Today, 86,012 cases [deaths] have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the worlds coronavirus league table above even China.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster
Is this what MAGA has come to? The only truth with respect to Trump is that whatever Trump touches it fails.
empedocles
(15,751 posts)Laelth
(32,017 posts)The number of confirmed cases is much higher.
-Laelth
usaf-vet
(6,094 posts)I will edit to cases [deaths]