Once the virus reached the US, no matter if from Dr. Evil's Fortress or from a Color Out of Space, how did the US screw up so spectacularly?
But, as I wrote, I never get a direct answer to this question - here being only an example. What I get instead are lectures from these people about the best way to tackle it.
Seriously, what do you think that the US did wrong? Because in the US we had lockdowns for months, we had universal masking mandates for months.
You seem to be angry about your father dying. That's understandable and a legitimate tragedy.
This will be long.
No, I'm not angry that my father died. He was old and had a very good life. I'm not ever angry at our own government, because I understood that everyone was learning by trial. If anything, it was the fear of applying too draconian measures that allowed the pandemic to rage. Only when truly draconian measures were applied we were able to contain it. It was too late for my father but that's life.
And, true, everybody dies, but this is not a reason to chase death. I often hear "These people died
with COVID but they had another disease. Seldom I hear: "But, maybe, without COVID they would be still with us."
I'm not angry towards the US. Looking from outside I think that they incredibly messed up the answer to the pandemic, thinking that a virus can be fought with slogans like "Masks = Tyranny!" and the endemic "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!"
AGAIN...Because during the Spanish Flu pandemic the US reacted
exactly the same way, causing untold unnecessary deaths.
Let's take the TARDIS and go back for a few minutes to 1918. So, how were the US reacting to a deadly pandemic?
Almost no one listened to science. Masks, surprise!, were "against freedom". Doctors pleaded the various political organs to stop "War Parades"
amid a pandemic. They were labeled as "against the morale" (the then sobriquet for "unpatriotic").
The result were events like the unfamous "Liberty Loan Parade" that was held in Philadelphia on Sept, 28th 1918 - when the pandemic was already so raging that the Army had cancelled the next draft call. Medical authorities of any kind implored for the parade to be cancelled. "No, because it was politically 'against the morale'". Some implored the newspaper editors to publish warnings or, at least, basic suggestions about how to protect yourself if you attended the parade. No one published anything.
Two days after the parade people literally started falling ill in the street. The result was one of the biggest superspreader events in history. Hospitals in the city were so crowded that they began refusing new patients. Sick people queued anyway outside the doors. They died on the sidewalk.
Colonel Charles Hagadorn, commander of Camp Grant, had ignored the medical guidelines for the Army (why??) and packed his barracks with young men. On Oct, 8th he read the latest flu casualty bulletin and committed suicide.
The Director of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and Charities, Dr. Wilmer Krusen,
a political appointee who hadn't acted against the parade ("There is no danger" were his exact words), assured that "There is no need to get frightened or panic stricken over exaggerated reports."
(Sounds familiar?) The day after the daily death toll doubled.
And this was happening while normal illnesses, accidents and people injured in criminal acts still happened. Doctors and nurses were ran to the ground.
And then doctors and nurses started to become ill too. And to die. At the Philadelphia General Hospital, eight doctors and fifty-four nurses became sick
in the span of a few hours. Ten nurses died. Fear and panic started to pervade the health-workers too.
When looking at the dead, cyanosis in some of them was so intense that some scientists actually suspected that this was not a Flu but a resurgence of the Black Death.
Did all the above stopped other "Liberty Loan Parades"? Or, when the (infected) Army returned home, "Victory Parades"?
No, of course not.
If you want to fact check, you can find everything here, with a bit of effort:
https://www.influenzaarchive.org/WOOOOOOOSH! Back to modern times. This was then. Today the US learned, didn't they?
Well...
No. I'm not angry at the US. For sure their imprudence helped the creation of variants but, AFAIK, not the dangerous ones (it was still imprudence) I'm angry when someone from the US thinks that he can still "lecture" the World using the very same arguments that enhanced the mortality rate of a pandemic 100 years ago. (Does anyone studies, at least, his own history?) I'm angry when someone from the US denies everything: Science? It is imperfect, not credible and if you speak for it you somehow are turning it into a religion. The government? The less is said, the better. The media? Fake news! Personal experience? Hearsay! Common sense? Deep state and Pleiadians! - and then they lecture.
Military attitude and "rah rah" slogans cause orgasmic reactions when used against the struggle with a virus that - in case someone missed it - grounded a whole aircraft carrier. And when was the last time that a US aircraft carrier was put out of commission by an external agent? (my research shows that it was the USS Bismarck Sea, sunk by Japanese kamikaze pilots during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945; I don't know if there were more carriers put "out of commission" but not sunk; ironically, those kamikazes died, a virus multiplies).
Sure, COVID isn't as deadly as the Spanish flu. But today the World is more complex and fragile. A single ship that blocked the Suez Canal for a week disrupted commerce all over the World. Everyone is more and more responsible for everyone else. Not in everything, but at the very least in some crucial matters. Coming together
in fighting a pandemic is only sane. And I don't see the US realising this. Not all in the US, at least.
So, yes, I get angry when I get some stupid lecture from the US and I'm worried when a country -
any country, to be absolutely clear - behaves in a way I consider to be potentially dangerous for everybody. Sorry, but this is the way I see it.