The United States is in the vanguard of a great push by global capital to throw the workers of the world into the cauldron of flames of a pandemic.
While the right wing in the United States rants and raves attempting to blame China for the immense death toll in their own country, the fact that the Trump administration, aided and abetted by many state governments, has staggeringly dropped the ball is obvious to any objective observer.
The death toll in the United States due to Covid-19 is stunning. As of today there have been at least 1,548,646 cases and 93,214 deaths, far above any other country.
I say "at least" for a reason. The number of cases is likely far higher than that and so is the death toll.
While the mainstream media, buoyed by liberal narratives and the Democratic Party leadership, including Joe Biden, talks of a lack of "transparency" in the PRC, the utter and total lack of transparency in the interests of capital by American governments is right out in the open.
The Americans are openly attempting to suppress data and information that runs counter to the push to "reopen" and they are making no attempt to even hide it. If this was any other country in the world, the international outrage would be palpable. But even as the empire acts like Rome in the days of Nero or Pompeii, its sycophantic allied governments around the western world such as Canada merely standby quietly and tremble.
When Trump hears of the United States hitting a total of 1.5 million confirmed cases he calls it a "badge of honour" and attempts to frame it as being all about mass testing even as this testing was a long time coming and it almost certainly is not catching anywhere near the total number of cases out there. Trump's desire to claim that there are as many cases and deaths in the United States as there are being due to testing is both inane and oddly clever in its appeal to those with a degenerate understanding of science and medicine.
No, testing is not the reason that there are so many cases. The reason there are so many cases is the incredible ineptitude and inaction of the American government -- as was true of so many western governments -- that knew and was informed of what was unfolding in China and did exactly nothing to prepare for it arriving on their shores.
The United States being the United States everything about Covid has been deeply racist:
New figures compiled by the non-partisan APM Research Lab and released on Wednesday under the title Color of Coronavirus provide further evidence of the staggering divide in the Covid-19 death rate between black Americans and the rest of the nation.
Across the country, African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans.
More than 20,000 African Americans – about one in 2,000 of the entire black population in the US – have died from the disease.
This should be surprising to exactly no one, but the reality that it is people of colour who are more likely to be the workers who will die due to the structural racism of American capitalism is exactly what is fueling white supremacist support for the anti-lockdown protests.
They want their haircut. And if a Black American has to be sacrificed to provide it, that is just fine with them.
Meanwhile, as the states are racing ahead with lifting all restrictions they are not inclined to let anything like facts get in the way.
In GOP Florida a "scientist who created a dashboard for monitoring Florida's rising number of COVID-19 cases said she's been fired for refusing to manipulate the data." They don't really want it known how many are dying as people might not want to shop, work or go to the beaches if they did.
They have good reason to be concerned and to fudge the numbers. Basically every place in the world that has "reopened" from China to Germany to the United States has seen a resurgence in cases. Texas has seen a massive upsurge that the governor, taking a page from Trump, has blamed on "testing".
Who knew we could see cancer or diabetes rates decline if we simply didn't test for them? The American magical thinking tour could cure all.
In one sense they are right about the testing. When it is done it shows that Covid-19 is very widespread and is a serious threat. We have heard from no less than Dr. Anthony Fauci that the number of actual cases and deaths from the pandemic are "almost certainly" higher than the official counts precisely due to insufficient testing.
This does not mean that the testing is making things look worse than they are as Trump and others would imply. It means the delays and overall lack of testing have made things seem much better than the devastating truth.
The United States is in the vanguard of a great push by global capital to throw the workers of the world into the cauldron of flames of a pandemic. And American governments are doing all they can to make sure that those workers don't understand they are to be burnt at the stake of profit.