Democrats are mining the coronavirus crisis for political gold. People are suffering and dying, and it is President Trump who occupies the White House. It sounds cynical but is nonetheless true that a tragedy can be a gift for an opposing party, especially in an election year.
Sen. Kamala Harris knows that and is taking advantage of it. “This virus has impacted almost every country,” Harris said in her first official speech as Joe Biden’s running mate. “But there’s a reason it has hit America worse than any other advanced nation. It’s because of Trump’s failure to take it seriously.”
Trump has been shifty on the virus, suggesting more than once that it will just go away. It clearly isn’t going away. At other times, he has been more grave, even too grave. Still, the states have been driving the coronavirus response with funding from the federal government. Trump obviously has responsibility, but not all of it, as Harris suggests.
Even with the patchwork response, the United States has fared better than other nations on some key metrics that are often ignored. The numbers most often cited by the press are current infection numbers and deaths. The U.S. currently has the world’s highest numbers in both categories, which is shocking. It is also one-dimensional, especially as a measure of how badly the country has suffered relative to others.
Based on current data, the U.S. has fewer cumulative COVID-19 deaths per capita than Belgium, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, or Sweden. The U.S. number is only slightly higher than Brazil’s, and it only just passed France’s number earlier this month.
That metric does not suggest America has been hit worse than any other advanced nation, nor does the country’s cumulative case fatality rate, which is the ratio between confirmed deaths and confirmed cases. The U.S. has a lower case fatality rate than each of the nations above, including Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, Brazil, and Germany. It is about equal to Austria’s.
Harris also went after Trump on the economy. “The president’s mismanagement of the pandemic has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Harris said. The U.S economy has struggled but actually fared better than much of Europe did in the second quarter. The U.S. shrank by 9.5% during that period. Germany shrank by 10.1% and Spain by 18.5%. France shrank by 13.8% and Italy by 12.4%. The U.K. contracted by an astonishing 20.4% in the second quarter.
The thing to recognize is that much of the world is struggling, and several “advanced nations” have suffered even worse than the U.S. has. The terms that Harris laid out were that the U.S. is worse off than other advanced nations. A number of measures prove that isn’t true.
