The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Warp-speed spending joins surreal stats
The U.S. effort in World War II was off the charts, but that was cheaper for Americans than the pandemic.
WASHINGTON >> The U.S. effort in World War II was off the charts. Battles spread over three continents and four years, 16 million served in uniform and the government shoved levers of the economy full force into defeating Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.
All of that was cheaper for American taxpayers than this pandemic.
The $1,400 federal payments going into millions of people’s bank accounts are but one slice of a nearly $2 trillion relief package made law this past week. With that, the United States has spent or committed to spend nearly $6 trillion to crush the coronavirus, recover economically and take a bite out of child poverty.
Set in motion over one year, that’s warp-speed spending in a capital known for gridlock, ugly argument and now an episode of violent insurrection.
For a year now, Americans have grappled with numbers beyond ordinary comprehension: some 30 million infected, more than half a million dead, millions of jobs lost, vast sums of money sloshing through government pipelines to try to set things right.
How high can you count? At one turn after another, that may be the rhetorical question of these COVID-19 times.
THE TOLL
Once, the attack on Pearl Harbor was the modern marker for national trauma. About 2,400 Americans died in the assault on the naval base in Hawaii that drew the United States into the Pacific war. The nearly 3,000 dead from the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, 2001, became the new point of comparison as the ravages of COVID-19 grew.
The U.S. reached a total of 3,000 COVID-19 deaths even before March 2020 was out. By December, the country was experiencing the toll of 9/11 day after day after day. In that time, COVID-19 was killing more Americans than any other disease, any other single cause.
“COVID-19 now is the leading cause of death, surpassing heart disease,” Dr. Robert Redfield, then leading the Centers for Disease and Prevention, said Dec. 10. Looking to the weeks ahead, he said “it’s going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”
So it was, even with the vaccine rollout five days later.
With deaths now moderating — so that a 9/11 toll comes cumulatively every few days — the U.S. death toll now has surpassed 530,000, exceeding U.S. combat deaths of all of the last century’s wars.
A new marker looms: the estimated 675,000 Americans who died in the 1918-19 pandemic misnamed the Spanish flu.
That milestone may not be reached, if worst-case scenarios are avoided. Yet this much is clear — the United States has taken a proportionally worse hit in this pandemic.
The U.S. has experienced 1 in 5 deaths worldwide, compared with 1 in 75 deaths globally by the rough estimates of the pandemic a century ago.
THE RESPONSE
The blame game is on, exacerbated by the record of a president, Donald Trump, who rarely acknowledged the gravity of the crisis and routinely distorted it. He told Americans in March 2020 the country would be “just raring to go by Easter” and declared on the cusp of soaring infections that the U.S. was “rounding the final turn” on the virus.
“We were hit with a virus that was met with silence and spread unchecked,” President Joe Biden said in his prime-time address Thursday. “Denials for days, weeks, then months.”
But while Trump persisted in sunny side up, he also opened the coffers on vaccine development and pandemic relief, backing $4 trillion in aid, equal to 20% of the U.S. economy.