It’s getting worse

| 7:30 pm EDT August 1, 2020
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When I recently compared Friday’s and Thursday’s figures on worldometer.com, a website that tallies coronavirus statistics including American deaths from COVID-19, I noticed something that spookily pricked my memory. Worldometer revealed that between those dates, 1,462 Americans had died. I recalled that there are 1,440 minutes in a day, so a little more than one American per minute died from COVID-19 between Thursday and Friday. Those numbers have been fairly consistent for the last few days. They will soon increase, of course, but for now, roughly one American dies every minute of every day from COVID-19. Sundays too.

Taking into account that a typical 18 hole game of golf takes roughly four hours to play, every time Donald Trump plays golf, roughly 250 Americans die. Of course, that number and more might die of hunger, or from automobile accidents, or from cancer. What’s my point? My point is most of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if Trump had just done his job. In other words, if he’d done even half what Angela Merkel of Germany or Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand or Katrín Jakobsdóttir of Iceland had done, to pick three exemplary leaders, most of those Americans would still be alive.

I believe the reason Trump never mentions the more than 155,000 American COVID-19 deaths (as I write this) is because his standard complaint, that America has more cases because America does more testing, doesn’t explain the deaths. Even Trump must realize that, while more testing may reveal more cases, more testing doesn’t explain why America has more COVID-19 deaths by far than every other nation on the planet.

India is second with a grand total of 35,743 COVID deaths thus far. Of the top 149 nations of the world, America is eighth in deaths per capita. That represents a staggering failure on Trump’s part. The grim consolation is that today there are 155,000 fewer Americans that must endure getting tired of winning, thanks to Donald Trump.

But in deadly earnestness, when I imagine grim statistics like fatalities, it’s difficult to remember that we’re dealing with human beings, particularly when grappling with numbers too large to readily visualise. Each one of these people has left other people behind, some more some less, but the net effect is measurable in untold misery and grief. We are shielded from most of the tears and most of the cries of inconsolable heartache, but I can assure you they are out there, and uncounted lives have been destroyed or disfigured by agony — because the president of the United States simply does not give a shit.

This is why, more than any of the million other reasons, that Donald Trump must go. The blood of 155,000 dead Americans cries out to us. We owe it to them and their grieving survivors to get rid of the menace in the Oval Office. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.