Author: Common Dreams

The United States leads the world in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. It is also among the global frontrunners for organized political idiocy, as President Trump’s deadly incompetence in managing the crisis has left many Americans in despair, their hopes for the future uncertain if not on life support. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported 1,504,830 total cases and 90,340 deaths from COVID-19 as of May 19. While state case reports vary, further waves of disease are likely unless vigilant public health measures, including greatly expanded testing, contact tracing, and quarantining, are in place. For Trump and his right-wing...

To assist those wanting a more simple accounting of how President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Public Citizen recently released a fresh list of a dozen specific ways the president’s decisions and public pronouncements served to speed up the spread of the deadly virus. The consumer rights group noted that while the death toll readies to pass the 100,000 person threshold in the United States, “the chaotic and incompetent response” of Trump—from his failure to prepare the nation for such a calamity in the first place to his repeated assault on scientific understanding and undermining the warnings...

As U.S. states move to reopen their economies and loosen restrictions put in place to stem the spread of COVID-19, new modeling released Thursday shows a majority of the U.S. deaths thus far from the coronavirus could have been prevented had social distancing policies been implemented more quickly. The epidemiological modeling (pdf) from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health researchers looked at the virus’s national spread through May 3, 2020, at which point deaths had passed 65,000. The researchers found nearly 62% of reported infections—703,000 cases—and 55% of deaths — over 35,000 people — could have been avoided...