A Spring Fever from hell

Who would have expected that in the last year of the Trump presidency with the country  pathologically divided we (the humans race) would be visited by a monumental catastrophe - a pandemic of biblical proportions. The anti-Trumpians including Never Trump Republicans and the entire punditry often wondered how DJT would fare when confronted with a real crisis rather than the ones he inflicted on himself which he could at any time turn on or off like a spigot - see Trade War with China. Now we know.  

All of the kings horses and all of the kings men cannot now put this Humpty Dumpty back together again. We live in an age when too much is recorded digitally. Even the most obscure Internet user can find his or her life unraveling due to an unwisely posted video. And many a promising career has been short-circuited by some email note, jpeg file or video from their past. So it is with DJT in spades. It's all been recorded for all to see. It is totally impossible for this ultra publicity seeking cult figure and the 'President of the Free World' to extricate himself from his digitally recorded past. The televised blustery Nurenbergesque rallies, his rambling press conferences and his morning batches of spelling/grammar challenged Tweets are all there for posterity (and future political ads).


But in this case it is not only what he said or did, it was what he did not do during that fatal fallow period of inaction as the Covid-19 pestilence ramped up its insidious momentum. South Korea saw it. Taiwan saw it, Canada saw it. Hong Kong saw it. Why not us? With 14 intelligence agencies and a constant NSC presence in the White House, it must have taken DJT and his acolytes Herculean will power (or breathtaking stupidity) to so assiduously ignore this looming hell storm. But The Donald team managed to do so for a whole month.

But Trump aside we are still in deep doo doo. The data below are from the NY Times' daily updated mapping of the numbers of the pademic's carnage extracted from Johns Hopkins University's global tracking.  Some countries below like Japan and Brazil have lower numbers than one would expect probably due to a low level of testing or an early stage in the outbreak.

 

So as this pandemic engulfs the world, our numbers (shown in red) are positively numbing. As of yesterday (4/15/20) the US by far leads the rest of the  world in both the number infected with Corvid19, with 607318, and also with the number who have succumbed to it – over 26,000 and climbing. The table above shows those countries with the most (identified) cases along with that country's mortality rate. 

 Those countries shown in green have so far seem to have responded most successfully with low mortality rates. China is not included because their figures seem suspiciously low with a 2.2 billion population and only 84,802 infections. Those in gray have been hit the hardest so far both in terms of a high infection and a high mortality rates. It is really too early to see how this plays out globally. So far the only\ main takeaway is that US has over 3 times as may cases as any other country.  Our mortality rate at 4.29% still fairly low. Some have overwhelmed their health care systems like Spain and Italy. . This means our over worked, over burdened and under protected health workers are doing a truly selfless and heroic job.

This is just health care side of it all.  As much of the world's workforce is suddenly pulled from service in a unprecedented way no one yet has any real idea of how this will change the the once interconnected global economy as well each country's relative situation - or for that matter when all of this it will end.