The pandemic will kill more Americans than died in Vietnam // Trump suggests injections of disinfectant to cure coronavirus

By Dilip -
We've reached a horrible place, where dead bodies are being transported to Philadelphia's medical examiner in the back of an open pickup truck. More than 47,000 have now died of coronavirus in the US. Even if we assume we're at the top of the curve, tens of thousands more will die. By this time next week, it seems very possible that more people will have died in the US of Covid-19 than the the 58,000 who died in nearly of decade of fighting in Vietnam. We're already far past the more than 35,000 who died in Korea.

 Who will be held accountable for Trump's nonsensical ideas?
Medical experts denounce Trump's latest 'dangerous' suggestion: Trump has stunned viewers by suggesting that injections of disinfectant could cure coronavirus, a notion one medical expert described as “jaw-dropping.”  'It is incomprehensible to me that a moron like this holds the highest office in the land and that there exist people stupid enough to think this is OK. I can’t believe that in 2020 I have to caution anyone listening to the president that injecting disinfectant could kill you.' 

The country was much smaller during those conflicts. But everyone, it seemed, had a story. The same will be true now. Even if you don't know someone who has died of this disease, you can be sure the death toll includes relatives of people you've heard of. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's brother died and Rep. Maxine Waters' sister is dying, we learned Thursday. (Read this moving tribute by a former CNN colleague to his father, who died at 69 after 28 days on a ventilator in New York.)
The dead are not all elderly. The woman now thought to be the first US coronavirus victim was otherwise active and healthy. I can't stop thinking about the five-year-old girl in Detroit. We know so little. And there's more new data suggesting many more people have been infected than previously thought. Northeastern University researchers suggest that by March 1, when the first coronavirus case was confirmed in New York, more than 10,000 were already infected in the city. The same was true in other American population centers.

The country continues to try to figure out how to process tragic human loss on a wartime scale with the continued and unfathomable economic loss necessary to make sure fewer people die. A shocking percentage of Americans are now unemployed. ...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/24/politics/what-matters-april-23/index.html




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