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Let's see - US government instituted reasonably prompt lockdowns. They mailed one-time stimulus checks to everyone, gave 600$ unemployment insurance boosts, ramped up hospital capacities, opened up other support measures for businesses and allowed 50 parallel experiments (at state level) to see what works and what doesn't.

Was the response perfect? Certainly not. Did some other countries do better? I'm sure we could find a handful. Does this make the US a "totally failed shit-hole state"? HELL NO!!

And in case you think that the US is indeed one, it just means that you have only been exposed to Scandinavia and/or Singapore, or you have consumed too much of biased media which wants to maximize your anxiety and partisanship for their profits, or you are just trolling here to intentionally sow divisions. Assuming you are not in the last category, please go and learn about how things are in Brazil or India or sub-Saharan Africa. You will realize that the US is in a much better shape and things are handled far better than the media narratives.




> Was the response perfect? Certainly not.

No, it was not perfect. According to [1] the US has 27% of all cases of COVID-19, 24% of all COVID-19 deaths and 29% of new cases yesterday. For comparison US has 4.3% of world's population [2].

> Did some other countries do better? [...] it just means that you have only been exposed to Scandinavia and/or Singapore

Did some countries do worse? Italy is often cited as a badly hit country (and is not Singapore nor in Scandinavia), but if you look at their total cases curve [3] you'll see it has become nearly flat and new cases have been suppressed to near ~200/day from the peak of ~6k/day. For comparison, the corresponding plots for the US show a bungled attempt to flatten the curve followed by renewed exponential growth [4]. Daily new cases were only suppressed to ~1k/day from the peak of ~2.7/day.

> Does this make the US a "totally failed shit-hole state"? HELL NO!!

Well, what are the inclusion criteria? I'm asking, because when it comes to COVID-19 the US is doing so badly that now only 26 other countries have had more cases of COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic than the US added yesterday (73,388) [1].

[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

[3]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

[4]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/


> the US has 27% of all cases of COVID-19

has 27% of all the known cases - FTFY! Do you honestly believe the reported number of cases from the populous developing countries known for their corruption and a lack of functioning systems (I come from one, so I know first hand how they work)?

> I'm asking, because when it comes to COVID-19 the US is doing so badly...

so badly in terms of what? Reported number of cases, which is miserably under-reported due to a lack of testing / credible systems in the majority parts of the world (at least by population)? I know that people are losing jobs in the US, businesses are bankrupting but where I come from, people are starving and a 12 yo was begging for food when my sister went for grocery shopping, since his family hadn't had enough food in 2 days.

If you are in the US and haven't experienced a poor society first-hand (beyond a 2-3 week vacation in the tourist spots in such places), please count yourself lucky and appreciate what you've got!


The US has handled the pandemic worse than any country in the world, except maybe Brazil. Otherwise, I can't think of a country that has handled it worse.

Which countries are doing a worse job than the US in handling Coronavirus, in your opinion?


Apart from Brazil (which you mentioned), the US is doing a far better job than India and Bangladesh in terms of supporting the economy and social safety nets like one time stimulus payments, boosting unemployment benefits, aid to businesses etc. [Source: close families / friends living in those two countries].


The fact that US being compared with India and Bangladesh should already give you a hint about where the US stands.


Spain and UK all had a fair amount of drama and government incompetence, still have worse death/1M stats than the USA by a fair margin, and are forecasted to be hit harder economically (-11% vs -7% USA in 2020 GDP). It's still way too early to tell if they are actually going to end up worse, since this is still going at full swing in the USA, and there are a lot of uncertain factors, but I think there's a fair chance they end up being as bad or worse than USA.


Russia did very badly. First, lots of denial. Then, lockdowns so harsh in some places, Chinese could be jealous. And the burden was placed squarely on the businesses - the government effectively declared universal non-essential paid leave, but didn't subsidize it.

Oh, and the government successfully managed to use the epidemic as a cover-up for heretofore unseen levels of electoral fraud in the not-really-referendum on constitutional amendments.


The US had, by far, the poorest response to covid of any developed nation. Which is to be expected when the US is only a borderline developed nation.


Not really true. US had a terrible response at the start, made worse by the CDC test not working, putting us weeks behind ever other country. Then Trump decided wearing masks wasn't important and tons of people followed his lead, ensuring our case load stayed consistently high.




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