The Virus Will Win
Americans are pretending that the pandemic is over. It certainly is not.
Asecond wave of the coronavirus is on the way. When it arrives, we will lack the will to deal with it.
Despite all the sacrifices of the past months,
the virus is likely to win—
or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it already has.
In absolute terms, the United States has been hit harder than any other country.
About a quarter of worldwide deaths have been recorded on these shores.
And while the virus is no longer growing at an exponential rate, the threat it poses remains significant:
According to a forecasting model by Morgan Stanley,
the number of American cases will, if current trends hold, roughly double over the next two months.
So was the reason to hope that some magic bullet might rescue us from the worst ravages of the disease.
At this point, such hopes look unrealistic.
After months of intense research, an effective treatment for COVID-19 still does not exist.
A vaccine is, even if we get lucky, many months away from deployment.
nearly nine out of 10 Republicans trusted “the information you hear about coronavirus from medical experts” back in April.
Now just about one in three does.
Thanks to the effort of millions of people, we were close to a great success story.
But because of the failures
of Trump and Chauvin,
of the CDC and the WHO,
of public-health experts and
Fox News hosts,
we are, instead, likely to give up—and tolerate that hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens will die needless deaths.
Pandemics reveal the true state of a society.
Ours has come up badly wanting.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/virus-will-win/612946/
USA is getting about 21K news cases per day,
625K new cases/month,
3M new cases by Nov 3.
90K more dead, 200K dead, by Nov3
"If I lose, I'll just do something else"