Yesterday, writes the NY Times,
"Americans learned in the afternoon that the number of people in the hospital for Covid-19 was more than 100,000. That was nearly double the high point in spring, when the pandemic hit its first peak…. Then, not long after evening fell, the daily death toll in the U.S. surpassed the record set in April…. By the time all the figures were in, 2,885 Covid-19 deaths had been reported Wednesday, with no sign of a letup."
Also, notes the Times, the pandemic, in April, was centered in New York and New England, whereas today, it's everywhere.
Said Dr. Leora Horwitz, an associate professor of population health: "It’s terrible, because it was avoidable. We are a world outlier in this regard."
And the prize for this negligent homicide that has felled additional tens of thousands of our fellow citizens goes, of course, to Donald Trump.
His prolonged ravings about voter fraud are a post-election freak show, a national embarrassment, an aggressive assault on American democracy that will fill chapters in histories of the Trump era. Yet featured more prominently in histories of his pre-reelection defeat will surely be his utter indifference to the plight of millions, fundamentally advanced by this president's sneering at the most basic safeguards to prevent infection and death, thereby increasing its spread many times over — marooning us as a "world outlier"; a rogue, backward nation and the object of international bewilderment.
The only upside — and it's a small one — is that future presidential historians will forever rank him as the worst ever, in perpetuity.