The US has the highest rate of death due to coronavirus pandemic. ‘The greatest country in the world,’ just can’t admit that China succeeded in dealing with the Covid-19 threat while America has until now failed. Instead of learning from China, it’s suffering the world’s worst epidemic disaster.

Like a spoiled child, Trump started blaming others for his failures. First, the guilty one was China, then it was all the fault of the WHO.

Even if, as it is now known, he was forewarned by the CIA that starting in November there would be a pandemic in China that would reach the U.S.

The international course of the coronavirus pandemic is now established beyond challenge.

China was the world’s first country to suffer a major outbreak and to bring it under control – reducing the number of daily deaths to zero on April 6.

The US is suffering a worsening catastrophe.

US facts are clear. According to Johns Hopkins University, it has over 368,000 cases and more than 10,000 deaths.

The total fatal numbers in the US are already approximately three times as high as China, in absolute terms.

But then, as the US has less than one-quarter of China’s population, the US per capita number of cases and deaths is 12 times higher than China and rising rapidly.

The difference between the Chinese response success and the US failure is based on the different approach.

China acted as an adult, ‘seeking the truth from facts.’ Many in the US government engaged in childish national delusions. The lessons of the different attitudes include the pandemic but go far beyond coronavirus.

Few things are more dangerous for a country than to lie to itself.

A Statesman at the wheel must be realistic. Great disasters in human history frequently have resulted from attempts to cheat reality, or from wishful thinking. For example, in 1812, Napoleon thought that his usual logistics could supply from Poland to Moscow his half a million Grande Armée in the middle of a Russian winter; in 1941,Hitler believed that he could win an attack on the USSR because “You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down”. A disastrous denial of reality which unleashed the deadliest battles in human history: the mistake brought total destruction to the Third Reich plus 27 million dead in the fields of the Soviet Union.

Japan miscalculated when it thought that war on China was going to be a short-lived confrontation and believing it would be easy, similarly made a catastrophic mistake when it thought it could beat the US in the Pacific. Trump’s attitude of blaming others and denial of realities for US unpreparedness and slow reaction to confront a pandemic caused by a virus, is the typical behavior of a spoiled child.

Another reality that is being overlooked is the inadequacy of the US health system to deal with a real and deadly health crisis on a national scale. Because you cannot trust national health to a system whose main purpose is business and profit. It is very important, regardless of the failures, for the rest of the world that the US Government fully triumphs over the coronavirus plague as soon as possible.

Almeria 14/04/2020

- Umberto Mazzei

umbertomazzei2@gmail.com