From Smirking Chimp
COVID has now killed 1 in 1000 Americans in less than a year.
How is it that in Australia it's 3 out of every 100,000 people, and in New Zealand it's 1 out of every 200,000 people, but here in America we're dropping like flies?
Chalk it up to Republican racism and a libertarian indifference to the notion of society.
Trump's official emergency declaration came on March 11th, and most of the country shut down or at least went part-way toward that outcome. The Dow collapsed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.
Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.
And then came April 7th.
I remember that week vividly; it was as if a light switch had been flipped, and I commented on it on my radio show at the time (and many times since).
April 7th was the day that America learned that the majority of the people who were dying from COVID-19 were either elderly, black or Hispanic. Not so many white guys, after all.
Exactly one month earlier, on March 7th, Trump had played golf at his club in West Palm Beach, met with Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro at Mar-a-Lago, and visited the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. Over the previous week, US deaths had risen from 4 to 22.
In March, Jared Kushner even put together an all-volunteer task force of mostly preppie 20-something white men to coordinate getting PPE to hospitals.
Then came April 7th, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States. Other media ran similar headlines across the American media landscape, and it was heavily reported on cable news and the network news that night.
As the New York Times noted that day: "In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state's population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state's population is."
American conservatives responded with a collective, "What the hell?!?"
Limbaugh declared that afternoon that "with the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component." And here it was. "The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder -- harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody, disproportionate representation."
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