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In no other country have so many people died for Corona as in the United States. Now the country is crossing the next milestone and struggling to meet it.
20,000 flags for 200,000 dead: commemoration of the dead crown in front of the Washington Obelisk.
Photo: Keystone
On the lawn in front of the Washington Monument near the White House, there are now 20,000 little American flags. They are a sample of the memory of the 200,000 Americans who died as a result of the coronavirus. And they are a sign of protest organized by a group of friends and volunteers from the capital.
“This government has done nothing to remember the lives lost,” the group writes: there is no funeral, there is no remembrance day. “These lives are more than statistics. They were our relatives, friends, neighbors. “
No country has more deaths per crown than the United States. The country represents less than five percent of the world’s population, but more than twenty percent of the world’s death toll from the pandemic. Called this “sobering” and “shocking” Anthony Fauci, the government’s always reluctant chief immunologist.
“Absolutely incredible”
Other scientists express themselves even more clearly: It is “absolutely incredible” that the United States of all places has reached this point, said Jennifer Nuzzo of Johns Hopkins University. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said of dealing with the pandemic: “It didn’t have to be that bad.”
The flag campaign in Washington is also a warning of the boredom that many Americans have started long ago, including in the media. The big news channels still show the daily case numbers on the edge of the screen. But the reports have gotten more and more abstract: wLess obituaries and personal destinations, more naked dates.
And after the United States passed the 200,000 death mark on Tuesday, almost none of the major newspapers made the front page, as was the case with the first 100,000 deaths.
Trump: Doesn’t Affect Anyone
This is entirely in the spirit of Donald Trump, who gets poor marks for his handling of the pandemic. Today, the president campaigns almost every day in front of thousands of supporters, only a few of whom wear a mask. The 200,000 dead are “a terrible thing,” Trump said Tuesday.
But the day before he had stated at a rally: “In fact, it doesn’t affect anyone.” Of course, this is not true: With nearly 6.9 million corona cases since the pandemic began, most Americans know someone who has contracted the virus.
But when it comes to the progression of severe disease and the death toll, they are actually very unevenly distributed. Blacks and Latinos are proportionally more likely to die from the effects of the virus than whites, and at a younger age. Perhaps that is the reason for the “lack of empathy” with which the country finds itself with the dead and their relatives, the magazine mused «Atlantic».
Far from normal
Unlike most European countries, everyday life in the US has never returned to a certain degree of normalcy. 30 million people are registered as unemployed. Most students still attend classes virtually. The national number of new infections each day has barely fallen below the pre-spring level, but has stabilized at a high level, trending up recently.
If the contagion decreases in one area, it increases again in another. And last but not least, about 800 Americans still die from the virus every day. So the next milestone is only a matter of time.
