In some countries, normal life is back. Not here.

(Last of two parts)

Not all experts are as pessimistic as Gostin. Andy Slavitt, a senior health official in the Obama administration, has argued that with better tests, therapies and an eventual vaccine, life could broadly improve as soon as next year.

Others caution against making predictions. “We want to be able to give some assurance of, ‘Life will not always be this way, and it will be over soon,’ but we don’t know when that will be,” said Nicolette Louissaint, president of Healthcare Ready, an organization established after Hurricane Katrina to strengthen the health care supply chain for disasters.

But we know that the CDC forecasts total deaths from COVID-19 to rise to as many as 160,000 just by the end of the month. Many times that number will have long-term medical complications, and a record 5.4 million people lost their health insurance between February and May. A generation of American kids will have their educations derailed, and many parents who don’t lose their jobs due to the economic crisis will see their careers ruined by the demands of child care. The country’s international humiliation is total; historians may argue about when the American century began, but I doubt they’ll disagree about when it ended. The psychological consequences alone will be incalculable. Even before the coronavirus, researchers spoke of loneliness as its own epidemic in America. A March article in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry attributed 162,000 deaths a year to the fallout of social isolation. Now people are being told that they can socialize only under the most stringent conditions. Much of what makes life sweet is lost to us, not for days or weeks, but months or years. “We’re going to stagger out of it; we’re not going to snap back,” Gostin said of the pandemic. He added, “It’s going to take several years for us to be able to come out of all of the trauma that we’ve had.”

Yet somehow there’s no drumbeat of calls for the president’s resignation. People seem to feel too helpless. Protesters can make demands of governors and mayors, especially Democratic ones, because at the local level small-d democratic accountability still exists. Nationally such responsiveness is gone; no one expects the president to do his job, or to be held to account when he doesn’t. That’s how you know the country was broken before coronavirus ever arrived.

This suffering, your suffering, wasn’t inevitable. The coronavirus is a natural disaster. The Republican Party’s death-cult fealty to Trump is wholly man-made.