umair haque
The nation with the world’s highest Coronavirus death toll — where the first wave hasn’t even plateaued or slowed yet — reopening already. Seeing new spikes across half its states. What the?
America is about to show the world what a worst-case scenario for Coronavirus looks like.
The Trump administration has bungled Coronavirus unbelievably badly. Drinking bleach, it turns out, isn’t a cure. But it’s about to get so, so much worse.
In America, Coronavirus hasn’t slowed one bit. See that line above? In Europe, it’s flattened out. But in America, the worst case scenario is now about to come true. Since states are reopening, since the government has no plan, and as a nation, America seems to simply have… given up on it…Coronavirus is going to do three things. One, explode, just like it is in states like Arizona, Texas, and Florida, to name just a few. Two, go on rising for far, far longer than elsewhere, or than it needed to. And three, it will take much, much longer to flatten out, too.
We’re talking years, now, by the way. Coronavirus is now all but guaranteed to be a catastrophe that wracks America in a uniquely terrible and singularly disastrous way: striking it longer, harder, and worse than almost anywhere else in the world.
And yet even all that’s just an introduction to the worst-case scenario. What will the explosion of a deadly pandemic that lingers on and on then cause, socially, economically, politically? We’ll come to that.
To get there, first: just how badly has Coronavirus been bungled in America? Nobody really tells you. But if you do the math, the results are shocking. Staggering. Frightening. Surreal. Words simply fail.
Let me put America’s Coronavirus pandemic in context. America’s 8th in terms of deaths per million in the world currently. All the countries ahead of it are European. You might think that’s good news, but in fact, it’s terrible news: Coronavirus hit Europe before it hit America. They were hit first and hardest by Coronavirus, with the exception of China. And now, in most European nations, the pandemic — or at least its first wave — has plateaued and peaked. Covid is now subsiding in Europe, because countries there had swift and firm plans to deal with it, while it’s growing in America.
So now almost every major European country has seen a peak and a rapid decline in cases and deaths. But in America, the curve is still rising. This is why it’s eminently bad news that America, which is one of the later nations to be hit, is already having some of the highest deaths per million. Just 28 people died in France yesterday. 78 in Italy. Just 40 new cases were registered in Denmark. And so forth. European nations haven’t bested the virus. But they are getting ahead of it, slowly.
Some nations have already bested the virus. New Zealand has no new deaths at all. It’s a remarkable achievement. But neither does Taiwan. In Vietnam, there was just one new case yesterday.
In America? The death toll is still about as high as it was in the beginning of April. And it’s about to skyrocket right back up — not fall further. Not to mention, new projections place the ultimate death toll in America at 500,000 deaths. Half a million lives.
America will not have the experience that Europe and much of Asia have: of being a society that’s beaten the virus, flattening deaths right down to nothing. Instead, the virus is about devastate it. Even more than it already has.
What does this list of nations — those who’ve quelled the virus, and those who’ve crunched its curve — have in common? The list of things you might expect a sensible society to do. The earlier a society locked down, the more people cooperated, the more governments listened to scientists — the better a nation’s Coronavirus response. That much only makes eminent sense.
But America did precisely the opposite — and it’s still doing it. First, Trump denied, then he dithered, then he told people to drink bleach. There never was, and still isn’t, anything resembling a national strategy to combat a pandemic. In the vacuum, chaos reigned. That is how America got to the world’s highest death toll — a complete and total lack of leadership, direction, or support, from the very top.
As a result, now, states are reopening. Those states which have reopened are already seeing catastrophic results. Cases are spiking dramatically — to higher levels than ever. Clusters are forming, and the virus is spreading.
What does that tell us? That the death rate, over the coming weeks, is going to accelerate. The death toll is going to climb and climb. America already has the world’s highest death toll. But it’s about to shatter even the grimmest expectations.
How many more will die? The worst expectations were around 200,000. But that number is going to be easily — easily — surpassed now. To understand that, you only have to think: America’s already past 110,00, but the virus hasn’t peaked — instead, states are reopening, and the pandemic is going to accelerate all over again. 200,000 — when America’s already past 100,000, and there’s no sign whatsoever of a slowdown, much less a plan to slow the pandemic down? Forget it. Now we’re looking at a number well, well past that.
How high is that number going to be? The answer is: nobody knows, because nobody actually thought a nation would be catastrophically foolish enough to experience a worst case scenario. Most of the estimates involve some level of reasonability: a government that tried to stop the pandemic, people who cooperated, officials who enforced lockdown and meant it, a society in which most if not all people wanted not to get sick. America appears to have little to none of these things. Nobody expected a country like America: one that encouraged the worst-case scenario, as if it to say, “bring it on!”
So: nobody knows just how high America’s eventual Coronavirus death toll is going to be. What can be said are four things.
First, it’s going to be staggering — a genuinely surreal — number. Doctors are already projecting the death toll will be closer to 500,000, possibly approaching a million or more, over time. Just think about that for a second.
Second, America is going to have the highest death toll in the rich world by a massive, huge, astonishing margin. And probably one of the highest overall death tolls in the world. The only nations I can really imagine exceeding it by now are India, Pakistan, and Russia. Not exactly a club of the world’s most capable nations, at this point. Let me put that another way. America will have a death toll resembling that of desperately poor countries and failed states.
But, third, America should never have had a death toll that high. How many Coronavirus deaths are needless? Epidemiologists estimate that 90% are. Crunching a few numbers myself, I conclude just the same. If America had had New Zealand’s approach, just 1500 people would have had to die. Instead, a figure approaching 100 times that number already have.
Reflect on that for a moment. How shocking is it that of the huge, huge wave of death about to hit America — potentially half a million deaths— the vast, vast portion is…utterly and totally needless, as in: these people never needed to die at all? What the?
Fourth, this is what it means to be a failed state. You die. Huge numbers of people die from needless catastrophes. We’re used to thinking of them as African famines or Asian floods. But to that list we must now add American pandemics. If 90% of 250,000 people, 500,000 people, a million people…never needed to die…we’re talking numbers at a scale that makes history weep.
The world is already shocked by America. Not just the cities on fire. The lunatic President, dissembling and shuffling. The intellectual class, that failed to see any of it coming. Or even the other grim features of daily life — school shootings, endless debt, endemic poverty. But something this astonishingly dystopian. More than a hundred thousand already dead — and a nation that seems to shrug in indifference, reopening, refusing to wear masks, pool partying. What on earth?
America is about to show the world what a worst-case scenario for Coronavirus looks like. It’s going to be catastrophic. The deaths will be off the scale. Society will convulse in panic, shock, and fear. Chaos will stalk the streets. The economy will go on imploding, right on into forever. That will cause the already collapsing middle class to crumble faster, setting off a chain reaction of depression. Mass death, depression, despair, social disintegration, political paralysis, a perpetual state of numbness and shock. That’s the worst-case scenario. It’s like something out a dystopian movie — only now, Americans are living it.
But that’s not all.
America will become something more than a failed state: a plague state. That means: a nation still infected by a virus much of the world has bested or conquered. That will have predictable consequences, too. When Europe is Corona-free, how welcome do you think Americans will be there? When Asia’s tamped down, how much business do you really think Americans will do there? America will suffer socially and economically as a plague state. Its people will be shunned, its businesses will be punished, and it will be kept at arms length.
Do you think a world that’s fought hard to beat the pandemic will want to get infected by it all over again — just because America’s America, and, well, it was too foolish to care as much? Of course not. America will become a pariah state as it becomes a plague state.
A plague state is something that the world hasn’t seen in many, many years. Decades. Maybe even centuries, depending on how you look at it. A nation where a virus is still raging, that much of the rest of the world has conquered. Of course, such a nation must be quarantined. Plague states don’t do well. They suffer immensely — not just from illness, but from isolation, too. From the lack of trade, contact, and friendship that still being sick brings with it. That’s all in America’s immediate future, now, though. It’s chosen to become the plague state of the modern world.
And if you think I exaggerate, consider for a moment that even China has Coronavirus under control by now. The only nations which don’t — again — are either desperately poor, or failed societies, or both. But that’s just what Coronavirus tells us is true of America, now, too
America’s bizarre inability to deal with Coronavirus, I think, marks its final transformation to becoming both a failed state, and a poor country. A nation that can’t govern itself in basic ways — providing people public health, as in, freedom from a deadly virus. And a society so impoverished that people have to choose to return to work, even if it means risking death at the hands of a pandemic. A depression on the cards, while mass death erupts like a supervolcano. Does this kind of thing really happen in civilized, functioning, modern societies?
The worst case scenario is all that. It’s not just mass death, although that’s awful enough. It’s not even just economic implosion or political chaosor social despair. It’s also becoming something bizarre and unique, rarely seen in history: a plague state. It’s having your fate sealed as a poor country, and a failed society by all that, as the final straw breaks the camel’s back of failed institutions and leaders. The worst case scenario coming true in America is a society, too, in which people — enough of them to cause a pandemic to explode — genuinely don’t seem to care if they or anyone else lives or dies. It’s death, in a kind of deep way: the death of civilization, decency, dignity, meaning, worth, while brutality, folly, ignorance, and cruelty reign.
The worst-case scenario. If you’re American, get ready. It’s going to much, much worse than you think. If you’re not American — thank your lucky stars. And learn the lesson of what can become of a society when it gives up, at last, on itself.
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