A Profound Failure

I think I'm going to show this graph everyday.  It is unquestionably the single most clear graphic representation of the abject failure of political leadership in our country.  It is a leadership failure that obviously could have been avoided.  But, Trump refused to lead and the Republican Party is a group of toadies, who have given up any pretense of supporting the public good.  So, we have the world's highest level of Covid-19 infections and deaths and things are getting worse by the day.  



This should be shouted from every media outlet until every Republican is tossed out of our national government.

This represents a profound failure. The clearest explanation is the lack of any clear national mitigation strategy and a failure to follow even the limited strategy the federal government outlined for ending the lockdown. Since early May the federal government’s clearest strategy has been to turn the page and move on, both in messaging and action. Most of the country felt the epidemic only in a very limited way in March, April and May. It is simply human nature that people in those states would assume some level of invulnerability and be less mitigation-compliant. The federal government has encouraged and enabled this tendency. Indeed the President has single-handedly made resistance to masking – which a growing body of evidence suggests are quite effective at scale – a badge of right-wing political identity.