Could this have been avoided? That's the question I've had on my mind for the past few days. My friend J and I were talking the other day and he raised some good points. Points that led me to the short answer: No. It's an American thing. You wouldn't understand.
I know there are people who gripe about President Trump's leadership (or lack thereof). I'm one of those people. But when I think about it I don't know that things would have been much different under a President Clinton (or even a President DeWine--although I have a lot of respect for him). Had a different president taken the COVID-19 threat more seriously sooner, and taken steps to address it, I suspect there would have been a furious outcry from the public. The American people would have been enraged at any kind of government mandates, restrictions, requirements or expenditures on a crisis that seemed far away and nothing to do with us. Can you imagine a president that wasn't the darling of the right-wing media ecosystem doing any of the things this administration is doing? And doing them earlier, before the virus had even got a foothold? The opposition would be fierce and unrelenting. Even a "normal" Republican president would have faced pushback, and indeed a president of either party would have had had a hard time disregarding the furor of the electorate to do what needed to be done. In all fairness, our governor and others like him do not have to deal with the nation as a whole when making their decisions.
Could we have achieved widespread testing like South Korea and Germany did, and thus limit the need for the extensive lockdown of the country and the accompanying economic cataclysm? Even if we had the logistics to scale up nationwide testing, I don't think we would have been able to pull that off. Again, the American cultural climate is the culprit here. The intrusiveness of the contact tracing that South Korea required, the monitoring and tracking--all of it would have been met with outrage. We fuss now because people can't get tested unless they meet certain criteria, but imagine the government mandating that everyone be tested, symptoms or not. The people would have rebelled. And let's not forget that South Korea had already taken a black eye for MERS outbreak there some years ago and in a sense had a heard start, in that they had started putting in place the means to prevent another pandemic from taking such a toll on their country. Will we make meaningful changes to ensure that our country can keep on humming when (not if) the next outbreak comes along? I have my doubts.
My point is not to say that our American independence, our disdain for government schoolmarms, our fierce insistence on our individual rights is a bad thing. It's just a thing. In many cases it works out great for us. In other cases, not so much. This is one of those "not so much" cases. We're just one of those countries that are going to pay a high price, literally in trillions of dollars, as well as in thousands of lives, to do things our way. And in this case, our way is the hard way.
So let's see where the numbers are: I predicted 588,510 cases of the virus by this evening. I was off by 33,000 or so cases. The actual number is 555,164. I had predicted 26.033 deaths. Thankfully I was wrong again: 22,033 is the actual number. I did happen to get the 33 right but beyond that I was off by 4,000. Based on an increase of 20% over four days we should see a total of 832,746 cases by Wednesday night and a 32% increase in deaths will bring us to 7,051.
Our three states:
Florida: The number of cases rose 18% to 19,887, 0.09% of the population. The number of deaths rose 24% to 460, a rate of 2%. Florida has dropped to ninth in the nation in terms of number of cases and it is eleventh in the nation for number of deaths, meaning there are states with fewer cases but more deaths than Florida (Connecticut and Washington have that unfortunate distinction).
Ohio: The number of cases rose 20% to 6,604, 0.06% of the population. The number of deaths rose 19% to 253, a rate of 3.8%. Ohio's percent of increase in deaths slowed significantly over the past four days, but still I think I'd rather be in Florida than here if I contracted the virus. Ohio holds steady at 17th in the nation.
Nebraska: The number of cases rose 38% to 820, 0.04% of the population. The number of deaths rose 20% to 18, a rate of 2.2%. Nebraska moved up a notch to 36th in the nation, and though it's percent increase of death has slowed over the past four days it's rate of infection is the only one of the three with an infection rate that increased over the past four days.
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