Not everyone had to die: a moment of reflection on the 100,000 deaths from coronavirus in the United States.

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USA exceeds 100,000 killed by covid-19 3:45

(CNN) - The first tragedy of the devastating landmark of the coronavirus in the United States is that 100,000 people did not have to die. The second is that no one knows how many more will lose their lives before the pandemic disappears.

The death toll rose to six digits on Wednesday afternoon: 100,000 victims, who were Americans alive several months ago when the viciously infectious virus arrived. The milestone is the story of mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings, spouses, and even lost children. Families are devastated, and the dying are leaving alone. They cannot even be mourned due to social distancing, one of the cruellest impositions of the covid-19.

• READ: Opinion | Why does the United States have the highest number of covid-19 deaths in the world?

The 100,000 include Americans such as Martin Addison, 44, of New Jersey, the type of father who would imitate Donald Duck to delight his young son. Detroit's Geraldine Slaughter, who was in her 80s, died of covid-19 a few days after her two sisters.

Also, the virus has been disproportionately infecting communities of color. Black Americans account for 13.4% of the US population, according to the Census Bureau, but counties with the highest black population accounted for more than half of all covid-19 cases and nearly 60% of deaths. in mid-April, according to a study by epidemiologists and clinical doctors. The virus has also exploited currency gaps, as evidenced by infections in meatpacking plants, while many white-collar workers do their jobs from home.

The victims also include those who are still alive: the more than 30 million Americans whose livelihood disappeared in the most dramatic collapse in US economic history. A generation born amid fear of September 11 has just graduated from high school during another national trauma. Families near and far have not reunited in months, and may not in the next.

But a pandemic - an iconic moment along with the civil war, world wars, assassinations, and economic crises in the nearly 250-year history of the United States - is also political and governmental. Politicians, few as vociferous as President Donald Trump, want credit when things are going well. Then they must pay for the broken dishes when they fail.

The covid-19 assault is a unique event that did not occur a century ago, and no set of detailed plans, war games, and loads of epidemiological theories could have prepared the nation for such an unknown challenge.

However, it is also true that the United States has been plagued by one of the worst-managed mitigation efforts, and certainly one of the most politically divisive in the world.

In the years to come, in the inevitable Congressional committees and medical research, there will be enough guilt to share.

Supply chains outsourced to China, Beijing's own response to an emerging public health disaster, the missteps of the World Health Organization, and loopholes created by a U.S. federal system that often provoke power struggles in the face of disasters they will be criticized. How state governors were slow to recognize the threat within nursing homes could become one of the most egregious mistakes.

• READ: The masks seem to work to fight the coronavirus, even if some reject them and the US exceed 100,000 deaths

But despite that comment that defined the crisis in March - "I am not responsible at all" - much of the blame must inevitably fall on Trump. Such moments of national danger are exactly the reason for being of the presidents. There's a reason US dollars hit the Commander-in-Chief's desk - that's the place of problems that no one else can solve.

Trump's promise at the 2016 convention - "I can only fix it" - and his entire leadership model of fomenting divisions, inventing his own facts, and diverting attention from his failings by causing new scandals has been hopelessly exposed. The rising death toll brings its own judgments - that no number of attacks on the previous government or angry tweets can disguise it.

"We have it totally under control"

Trump often appears to be much more concerned with how the crisis has affected his own political perspectives than with those who died.

The verdict on Trump's failure to achieve a rapid and national coronavirus screening effort, as well as his frequent and premature declarations of victory, would not be as harsh if he had taken the obvious approach to a pandemic more seriously.

China closed Wuhan City and Hubei Province on January 23. Hong Kong, which became a model of how to flatten the curve, recorded its first case at the same time. The White House has disputed when and whether Trump was warned by US intelligence agencies about the coming storm. But it was all over the news, and given the interconnected nature of the globalized world, it was obvious that it would soon reach the United States.

More alarms went off on March 8 when Italy closed its Lombardy region amid a massive increase in infections.

Still, Trump wasted time from the end of January and until mid-March announced a "15 days to curb the spread" initiative amidst the denial, with misinformation about the virus swarming and creating an alternate reality in the it could disappear "miraculously".

"We have it fully under control," said the president on January 22. "We will practically block it when it comes from China," he said on February 2. But, concern was already mounting among the U.S. public health community about what came to be seen as the almost certain spread of the virus to the U.S. and also if the country was prepared for its onslaught in hospitals.

On February 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, enraged the White House, warning that disruptions in daily life in the United States could be "serious".

She told schools to start thinking about closings and businesses to prepare for telecommuting in a prediction that turned out to be a completely accurate recap of America's fate.

• READ: Why will the coronavirus crisis expand America's racial wealth gap?

The White House's preferred narrative came the same day in the voice of Economy Czar Larry Kudlow, and it would not be the first time in the following weeks that an unskilled political representative would discuss medical matters. "We have contained this. I won't say it's impenetrable, but it's pretty close to that, "said Kudlow.

"We have been tremendously successful, tremendously successful, beyond what people would have imagined," Trump celebrated the next day before launching into one of his frequent praises of Chinese President Xi Jinping, weeks before attacking him. country when he needed a scapegoat for the underperformance of his own government.

Weeks of denial worsened the numbers

Over the next few years, Trump's denial in the first few weeks will likely be considered one of the most damaging moments of the crisis. It contributed to the disastrous deficit that the United States later experienced. to develop a testing infrastructure - already hampered by a failed CDC diagnostic kit - and a shortage of protective equipment for emergency services personnel, doctors, and nurses.

The megaphone delivered to a president is one of the most effective methods of getting a country to start taking action. When there is silence, that brings its own problems, as evidenced by the lack of urgency shown by many states in preparing for the coronavirus attack.

• READ: If the United States had started social distancing the week before, approximately 36,000 fewer people would have died, according to a study

A Columbia University study published last week found that if the United States had started implementing social distancing a week earlier, it could have prevented the loss of at least 36,000 lives.

In the New York metropolitan area alone, 17,500 fewer people would have died if the United States had acted a week earlier, Columbia epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman said.

New York leaders blame the Trump government for failing to build a robust screening test system that would have shown how deeply the virus penetrated the community.

The first months of the deadly road the pandemic traveled in the United States were dominated by fierce political arguments about the deficiencies in the tests necessary to evaluate the control of the virus in the country.

In recent weeks, with most of the critical foci concentrated in the larger and more liberal cities, as well as in urban areas, a bitter debate has developed over the pace of reopening the economy.

Trump says the United States has "prevailed" in the pandemic and has often boasted that the country is now leading the way in screening tests in the world, a claim that is not supported by the per capita metric. According to the latest data from the Covid Tracking Project, the United States has conducted 15 million tests during the pandemic. Information compiled by the University of Oxford shows that after a slow start, testing in the US they are catching up. The country has conducted 45 tests for every 1,000 people, ahead of countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, but remains behind states like Australia, Italy and New Zealand, which has been widely praised for its handling of the crisis.

While Trump would like to brag about having the best response in the world against covid-19, the data does not confirm his claims. The United States has a rate of 30 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, a significantly lower figure than the most affected nations such as Great Britain, France and Italy. But the USA it is worse than Germany with 10 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants and South Korea with 0.52 deaths per 100,000, according to Johns Hopkins University figures. There is currently a mixed picture of the pandemic in the United States, suggesting that a turning point may be near. Currently, infections are increasing in 14 states, are stable in 17, and are decreasing in 19.

What's to come

Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the government's top scientists, has seen his public role marginalized when the White House bet on full support for the reopening, he warned CNN on Wednesday that the crisis is far from over.

• READ: Trump privately questions whether coronavirus deaths are overestimated while Fauci projects otherwise

With the opening of more and more states, Fauci argued that possible spikes in infections would not be obvious for some time.

"When you do that (reopening) and you don't see any negative effects in a week, don't be overconfident," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN.

"Because the effect of the spread will not be seen for two, three, and maybe even more weeks, and at that point there could be an increase."

Such uncertainties, as well as the lack of an effective vaccine and treatment against covid-19, explain why it is unclear whether the milestone of 100,000 deaths will be the last bleak and symbolic figure the United States will mark.

The University of Washington Institute for Health Measurement and Assessment (IHME) has now changed its projection of deaths in the United States to 132,000 by August, amid signs that widespread use of masks is helping to reduce infections. That figure doesn't take into account a dreaded spike of the virus in the fall.

And yet, wearing masks has become a fierce political controversy, in which Trump refuses to use face protection in public as some conservative supporters raise such precautions as a violation of basic freedoms. Trump's apparent opponent for 2020, Joe Biden, called him "dumb" on Tuesday for taking that position.

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