Before Donald Trump became president, he famously said he could shoot some dead in the middle of 5th Avenue, and he would still be elected.
But what if Donald Trump shot not one person dead on 5th Avenue but instead shot ten people dead per day since he took office. Shooting ten people dead per day since he took office would be about 12,400 people. Would he still be in office?
The unfortunate fact is more people would be alive today in the US if Trump shot ten people per day on 5th Avenue and responded to the COVID-19 pandemic as any other US President would have and acted sooner. Even just two weeks earlier.
“Experts: 90 percent of US coronavirus deaths could have been avoided if measures taken just two weeks earlier” Hill
The Hill reported[1] that health experts say had the US government acted just two weeks earlier, 90% of the 54,000+ people who have died so far in the US[2] from COVID-19- would not have died. That means had Donald Trump not been so concerned about how COVID-19 would affect his reelection chances and if he was not so cowardly and inept and he took the steps any other US President would have taken two weeks earlier, 48,600 people in the US would not have died from COVID-19 so far.
And because Trump has squandered every opportunity to do the right things, or even just get out of the way and let the career civil servants do what they normally would do, many, many, more than 48,600 people in the US will die because of Trump.
Think 54,000 US deaths were inevitable by now? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. South Korea and the US had the same number of COVID-19 cases on the same date when the first few cases were discovered. Today the US has over 900,000 cases. South Korea has under 10,708. The US death toll is surging past 54,000 and rising. South Korea’s death told to date is 240[3]. But it is worse than that. South Korea is testing more people per 1,000 than the US, so they have a more accurate count of COVID-19 cases. The US testing lags behind almost all countries per 1,000 people, so the US has many more cases that are not being counted than South Korea.
OK, South Korea has a smaller population than the US. But the population density of South Korea is higher than that of the US[4]. Higher density is an accelerate for the spread of COVID-19. As of 2018, the population density of South Korea was 515 people per square kilometer. The US population density is just 33 per square kilometer. Korea has 15.6 times the population density of the US.
[1] Source: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/493128-90-percent-of-coronavirus-deaths-may-have-been
[2] Source; https://www.nytimes.com/
[3] Source: https://www.statista.com/
[4] Source: https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/south-korea/usa?sc=XE92
