The United States of Coronavirus

The U.S . news has a problem, it’s talking about anything but its pandemic and public health emergency. Meanwhile the U.S. accounts for over 24% of global deaths due to Covid-19 and that is set to get much worse in July, 2020.

Oddly, the U.S. is not seriously considering more lockdowns or another Great Shutdown. States like Florida, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas and Georgia have seen large spikes in new cases since easing restrictions on businesses.

However national policy is not syncing with the health crisis on the ground. This is highly problematic for the economic recovery of the U.S. in 2020 and 2021.

Consumer Sentiment Won’t Rebound Anytime Soon

Nothing is worse for consumer sentiment than fear of the virus. The country hit more than 71,787 new cases on Friday, though the numbers of deaths have only begun to show signs of ticking up. Once the curve hits deaths, we will see a staggering jump in daily deaths in the U.S., starting likely next week.

Many states that reopened after the nation saw a lull in infections have since experienced a significant resurgence of the virus. They deliberately chose opening up the economy ahead of public safety.

Even as Florida continues to report record infections, the state is set to host the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville next month and has required schools to reopen in August for at least five days a week. The problem? Florida reported 15,299 confirmed coronavirus cases in a single day on Sunday, the largest surge in infections since the start of the pandemic, bringing the state’s total number of cases to 269,811.

America Has Chosen Economy Over Life

The President isn’t respecting his task force either. Fauci hasn’t met with Trump in more than a month and is being sidelined from TV appearances as the US coronavirus outbreak worsens. Of course this is problematic for a so-called democracy.

The political narrative is very bleak as global cases race past the 13 million infections point, where 136 of 569 thousand deaths have occurred in America.

As cases start to spread out of control, the attack rate becomes exponential with already close to 12% of Americans having had or asymptomatically having the coronavirus. Florida, a major epicenter of U.S. outbreak, reported 10,383 new cases as of Saturday morning after logging more than 11,000 cases the day before, according to the state health department. The deaths have yet to catch up with the spike in new cases.

Since then, the coronavirus crisis has worsened in the US. The nation has gone from averaging roughly 20,000 new infections per day in early June to recently hitting record high levels at about 70,000 daily new cases. We could see 100,000 daily new cases in mid July, easily.

The First Great Shutdown in the U.S. Was for Nothing

These states need to shut down bars, limit restaurants to 50% capacity, and have about 95% of the public wearing masks or face coverings, but that is not occurring. Even talks of another Great Shutdown are not occurring. When you weigh dollars against human life, American Capitalism isn’t exactly a model citizen of human rights.

Arizona, California, Florida and Texas — hotspots for the virus — have all seen their average daily death tolls hit record highs in recent days. But not much action has been taken in a coordinated manner. Each State just responds how it wants to regarding its individual circumstances. If that’s not a failure in leadership on the macro level, I don’t know what is.

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said he hasn’t met with President Trump in more than a month, even as the U.S. has documented record high levels of daily coronavirus infections. America hasn’t just lost the battle, it’s losing the war against the coronavirus out of China.

Dozens of towns in the U.S. seem destined to experience what New York City already experienced months ago. The surge of deaths will be intense, and this will only delay the economic recovery and postpone any supposed V-shaped recovery till later in 2021.

Democracy Without Conscience

If Fauci is the “conscience of America”, America’s conscience certainly seems to be broken. A country with a declining life expectancy, morbid obesity and poor public health emergency preparedness certainly isn’t equipped to deal with a Chinese pandemic. The American media isn’t even covering the pandemic clearly anymore.

At least 136,671 people in the U.S. have died since the start of the outbreak here, in March, and more than 3.29 million cases have been reported across the country. The death rate is still over 4 percent according to the latest figures.

The true mortality rate of the virus is thought to be around 1.5%. This would suggest that between 10-20 million Americans have already been exposed to the coronavirus, with millions more to come in the summer of 2020.

Amid tensions with China, we have a trade, corporate espionage, cold-tech, financial, currency and biological (warfare) war. Of course hardly anything about that is spoken about in the U.S. media as well. Donald Trump, while allowing the Fed to bail out the stock market, has hid the true economic cost of Covid-19 from the people of the United States. When deaths mount, the true failure of the situation will become quite morbid in late 2020, just as elections come front and center.