The Real Reason The Protests Are Out of Control

In 1992, the Rodney King riots broke out when four officers were acquitted of beating a black man. Many people are drawing a comparison between that and the riots in response to the apparent murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But the circumstances are noticeably different in one particular way.

In 1992, the rioters at least had the sense to wait until after the trial before rioting. In this case, even though there was broad agreement that this was a murder (or at least a crime of some sort) and it was a foregone conclusion that the officer involved would be arrested, uprisings have broken out even before the process of arrest and trial has even had a chance to work.

Some supporters of Black Lives Matter and related organizations claim that the protests were necessary in order to push the department to arrest Derek Chauvin. There is no proof of this. Not only is it possible that the MPD would have arrested and charged Derek Chauvin, there are recent cases, such as the conviction of Amber Guyger (who killed Botham Jean in his own apartment) which happened without this level of unrest.

Some argue that this case is more egregious than others we’ve seen, but this argument rings false as well. People have drawn a comparison to the case of Eric Garner, which seems similar because the suspect apparently suffocated and a surprisingly large number of cops responded to a pissant crime which barely seemed to warrant the attention of even one police officer. But although there was outcry in that case, the response was not this extreme.

And there was another case that was far more egregious, the shooting of Walter Scott. He was shot in the back by a North Charleston police officer, who is now in jail. The response to that case was muted compared to this one. So the assertion that the George Floyd case is worse than others is ahistorical. The cause of the animosity must be something else.

Many inhabitants of the Twitterverse appear to think that this is happening because people have finally had enough with racism. George Floyd is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. This narrative is flawed, though, since anyone familiar with the facts would be able to see that America is not racist. A long time has passed since the days of slavery and Jim Crow. America is not only one of the least racist countries in the world, but racism has consistently declined over the years. Besides, there is not yet any proof that the motive in this case was racism. Derek Chauvin could just be a giant douchebag.

All too often, people proposing this have ulterior motives. This is usually just a weak attempt to invalidate the American system, a system which works better than most, if not all, in history. This narrative is frequently advanced by people whose ultimate objective is to replace the system with something radically different. So the proper response to the “racist” narrative should be a dramatic roll of the eyes.

But I digress. Other supporters of the dissent point to disproportionate police violence, against black people. 25% of the people shot by police are black, even though black people are only 13% of the population. This stat is misleading, though, since even though black people are only 13% of the population, 25% of the crime happens in the black community. So the violence is proportional to crime rates, as I’ve pointed out before.

The real cause is something else. One point that the British writer Douglas Murray has made regarding the seeming increase in extremism around the world is that when the economics fail, people turn to more loony ideas. For example, in the wake of the great recession, the Occupy movement broke out. We’ve also seen the emergence of white supremacists, like Richard Spencer. Similar extremism erupted in the Great Depression, which fueled the flames of World War II.

Right now the economy is trash, thanks to the coronavirus. And people being out of work naturally increases fear and frustration, which can easily turn to rage. George Floyd may have been the spark, but the economic downturn is the real fuel for the fire. The activists are focused on the wrong target, but eventually that will diminish, because it’s happened before.

One of the reasons Black Lives Matter seemed to wither away over the past few years is that they moved away from the reasonable work of ensuring police accountability and began merely echoing leftist talking points, oftentimes based in a reductive, revisionist view of American history. Such as “America is based on slavery and genocide”, a talking point I debunked at some length recently.

When this happened, more rational people who wanted to ensure police accountability, but didn’t buy the Howard Zinn view of American history, abandoned the movement. The sheer volume of “AmeriKKKa” tweets I see online tells me that this ludicrous rhetoric will again damage the credibility of BLM and although we may see more police accountability, some of the more extremist ideas being pushed by these activists will be reined in by the more sensible amongst us.

This is good, because if the true source of the uproar is the virally induced recession, then the American government is not where the fury should be focused. Even though there were numerous missteps by federal and state politicians that potentially made the virus worse, they do not hold primary responsibility.

The ultimate blame lies with the Chinese government. The virus emerged from the polluted, unsanitary conditions their system produced. As I’ve noted before, this is typical of communist governments and noticeably less true in the democratic, capitalist free world. Hopefully, people will redirect this ire away from false narratives on America and towards the real threat.

But I digress. Again. The madness of these crowds, which is truly the result of the downturn resulting from COVID-19, is evidence that the cost of the lockdown may be starting to exceed the benefit. The argument in favor of ending lockdowns has always been that the cost of staying closed, which can consist of deaths from other causes (suicide, domestic abuse, etc.) and destroyed lives from lengthy unemployment, will exceed the cost in lives from spikes in COVID cases. With anarchy breaking out all over the country, we may have reached that point.

And there may be one peculiar silver lining to this strife. The people in the streets are not locked down and not socially distanced, although they are taking precautions with hand sanitizer and masks. So we’ll be able to see if the non-lockdown model used by the Swedish works. In the wake of this turmoil, we’ll be able to see if they cause a spike in COVID cases and deaths. If they do not, then it’s time to end the lockdown.

Even if there is a spike, though, it may be time to end the lockdown. Because even though the anger we see in the streets was set off by George Floyd, it is not the true origin of the anger. If George Floyd’s death hadn’t happened, something else would’ve set people off. Truly, it already did, since there have been other protests over the lockdown in recent weeks.

So Derek Chauvin has been arrested and will be tried, which is good. But the potential for riots and demonstrations won’t go away even if he’s convicted. They won’t go away until the economy returns to normal. So it’s time to restart the economy and end the lockdown. Although we should reenter the world cautiously, masked and socially distanced, we have to reenter the world. If we don’t restart the economy soon, the furor will boil over and the rioters will just burn the economy down.

Coronovirus Actually Shows The Failings of Communism, Not Capitalism

There’s been endless pontificating about how the coronavirus outbreak shows how capitalism has failed. Climate activist Greta Thunberg (and apparent virus expert, at least as far as CNN is concerned) insisted that this proves that “our societies aren’t very resilient.” Leftist writers at Salon.com and Al-Jazeera insist that this proves capitalism failed. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and other progressives are attempting to use the crisis as a reason to institute socialist reforms.

And a few days ago, the rather absurd hashtag #RIPCapitalism trended in response to news that Jeff Bezos was well on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Because Amazon is making a killing delivering much needed items to people sequestered in their homes. It’s not clear how a capitalist making money by providing for the populace during a pandemic is a failure of capitalism, but I never considered Twitter to be a particularly logical place.

The fallout from the virus isn’t necessarily a failure of capitalism. America and many European nations were caught off guard, but the capitalist nations of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan took action early and weathered the storm fairly well. So this hasn’t been because of any inherent weakness of capitalism. It’s just that certain capitalist countries didn’t react as quickly and as well as others. It’s about specific policies, not about the economic systems in those countries. It does indicate a failure in communism, though. Specifically, in the ultimate source of the virus (and a surprisingly large number of others), China.

It’s believed that the virus came from bats. Bats that are sold for food in the somewhat less than sanitary “wet markets.” But why do the Chinese eat bats? Bats are notoriously unsanitary. They’re basically flying rodents. It’s well known that spores from bat guano can cause cave disease. This is primarily a lung disease, but it can also get into the brain and cause significantly altered behavior. This is where the term “bat shit crazy” comes from. So what could possibly motivate someone to eat something like this?

The answer has to do with the numerous famines that came from Mao’s failed communist policies. Policies such as the ill-fated Four Pests Campaign, where the Chinese attempted to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Eliminating sparrows in particular was a huge mistake. The Chinese government believed that because sparrows would occasionally eat crops in the field, that killing them would increase crop yields. What they failed to realize is that sparrows also eat insects that eat crops. Without them, these insects ran wild and crop yields fell.

This and other policy failures resulted in mass starvation. So, when the more common meats in the human diet were in short supply, the Chinese government encouraged farmers to raise certain wild animals as food, including bats. Although food is no longer in short supply in China, at least not as much as it once was, the practice of eating bats and other strange animals became embedded in the culture. It’s actually become something of a bourgeois thing to do, and not the act of desperation it would have been decades ago. And if Mao hadn’t bumbled so many times, it’s likely that it would not be a part of their culture.

This is not the only failure of government policy that contributes to China’s poor health. Despite the outward face that China puts on with cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong which appear to be the picture of modernity, health hazards are common in China. They have out of control air pollution. They lose thousands of workers per year in coal mines due to unsafe conditions. And the wet markets aren’t the only unsanitary conditions in China. Chinese rivers are full of trash and sewage, for example.

Similarly unsafe conditions supposedly exist in China’s viral research labs. Some reports suggest that a research lab in Wuhan may be the ultimate source of the infection. Scientists don’t believe the virus was engineered, but the possibility that it was a naturally occurring virus that was being studied in the lab has not been ruled out.

It’s obviously more likely that a virus being studied in a lab would be naturally occurring one. Most viruses studied in labs are not engineered. At least, one would hope. I think we would all prefer that people not spend much time engineering viruses. But there have been reports that the lab in Wuhan had atrocious biohazard controls, and the Chinese, unsurprisingly, have been very much against having international inspectors review the site. This has naturally aroused suspicions of a cover up. It’s not uncommon for an authoritarian communist government to prioritize face-saving over problem solving.

China’s communist government appears unable to keep things clean. It reminds me of the utter rot and environmental degradation we saw in places like East Germany or Czechoslovakia before and shortly after the iron curtain fell. The communist governments of Eastern Europe were an absolute mess. And so is China. It’s not surprising that so many viruses have come from there.

The top down nature of their government concentrates too much power in too few hands, so when one of the communist party bosses makes a mistake, there are not sufficient checks and balances in the system to correct for it. In addition, the Chinese government has no respect for basic human rights, like free speech. If the people were able to criticize the government, they would be able to restrain them from these missteps.

Instead, the government suppresses anything that might make them look bad. But this disaster may be too big for them to suppress the truth. We already know they silenced the scientist who discovered the virus, and he ultimately died from the disease. And the New York Times also reports that the party silenced citizens in Wuhan who spoke out against the government.

This reminds me of the time the Soviet Union tried to suppress the truth of the Chernoybl disaster and spread misinformation. But the disaster was too big to cover up, and the truth eventually got out. Mikhail Gorbechev, the last general secretary of the communist party of the Soviet Union believed that the catastrophe may have been the thing that finally brought the Soviets down. And many, such as renowned historian Niall Ferguson, believe that COVID-19 may be China’s Chernobyl.

Many critics of China are proposing all sorts of sanctions to seek redress from China. Some have even proposed cancelling the debts owed to China. This is probably a bad idea, since it would damage the credit of the countries who do so and also the global debt markets. Others propose tariffs or seizure of Chinese assets. Many companies are considering moving their operations in China to other countries, perhaps even back to their home countries. And countries who were heavily involved in China’s Belt and Road infrastructure plan are threatening not to pay China for the work done as recompense for the damage done by the virus. These things could decimate China economically. And the same way economic troubles contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the blowback from COVID-19 could cause the Chinese communist party to come crashing down.

The Chinese government knows this, and their propaganda arms are cranking up and pushing back against criticism. Early on, China attempted to float the idea that the virus actually came from the United States. This is obviously balderdash, but it’s something that many Chinese people believe, since Chinese censors would block any information not approved by the government. The party has more recently insisted that the West stop finger pointing. And, predictably and tiresomely, they have tried to push the idea that the criticism is “racist”.

But as long as the criticism is directed at the Chinese government, and the Chinese Communist Party, it is not and can not be racist. Criticism of policies and mistakes is inherently unracist. We would literally be judging these institutions and the people who run them by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

There is a chance this will cause the collapse of the party. Which I hope is true, primarily for the sake of ordinary Chinese citizens who live under their boot. The Chernobyl disaster was a failure of communism and exposed in the Soviet Union the inefficiencies, inherent weaknesses, and vast corruption that seems inevitable with communist countries. The coronavirus may do the same thing for China.

An open, democratic, and free society would be far less likely to produce these viruses. Capitalist countries are generally more sanitary than others. A free China could finally produce a government that could clean up the messes in China. The virus may finally expose the inherent weaknesses of China’s communist system, and finally free it’s people the way Eastern Europe was liberated thirty years ago.

The French Doctor Who Wanted To Test Coronavirus Vaccines in Africa May Have Been On To Something

There was a bit of a row a couple of days ago when a French doctor suggested experimenting with a COVID-19 vaccine in Africa. This immediately resulted in social media doing what it does best. And that is broadcasting mass-produced outrage. Often in the form of badly spelled tweets. Usually butthurting over colonialism and racism and whatever. The standard Twitter rage mob.

One tweet that was spelled correctly was from Star Wars star John Boyega, who said “Africa isn’t a testing lab you pieces of $#!+.”. Okay, I changed that last bit. Similarly angry statements emerged from all over, followed by the usual calls for cancellation and whatever. Naturally, the French guy surrendered. And by that I mean apologized. Now, maybe he was being racist, maybe he was just being clumsy, as he claimed. I don’t care. But he may have been on to something.

Here’s what the doctor said. “Should we not do this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments and no ICUs?” I don’t think this is quite true. There are some masks, treatments and ICUs. But what is true is that the medical infrastructure of many parts of Africa badly lags behind the rest of the world. And if a deadly virus gets loose in Africa, the results could be absolutely devastating. Hospitals are frequently undersupplied in Africa. And even wealthy Africans could be at risk.

An example of this is Zozoro Makambe, a prominent broadcaster in Zimbabwe. He returned to Zimbabwe from a visit to New York, and within a week or so was complaining of a fever. Doctors initially believed that he did not have coronavirus, but he was eventually admitted. What followed was a disaster. A statement to the Daily News of Zimbabwe details how his family desperately tried to scramble to get the necessary resources to save him, finding that critical equipment and medicine was not in supply at the hospital, and in some cases, the country.

Normally, this sort of story would be considered a comedy of errors, but it ended with him dying, so it’s not funny at all. Understand that this was a journalist of some repute, from a wealthy, politically connected family. His father had been a politician and a member of the ruling ZANU-PF party, amongst other things. If you think about it, he’s kind of the Zimbabwean equivalent of CNN’s Chris Cuomo.

Chris Cuomo is also a prominent journalist from a wealthy, politically connected family. Son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and brother of current New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. And he has contracted COVID-19, but appears to be recovering. And I don’t think anyone was that worried about him succumbing to it. He was always going to have the access he needed to healthcare and doctors and so forth.

But a man in Zimbabwe who was nearly twenty years younger than him with a similarly privileged background did. Granted, this man did have a compromised immune system from the removal of a tumor a few months earlier. But he was still young and healthy, and in America or any other advanced nation, would have likely survived.

So if the system in Zimbabwe can’t save a relatively upper class type, imagine what happens when the disease gets its claws in the truly destitute in Zimbabwe. Of which there are many. It would be a biblical level catastrophe. Many of the healthcare systems in advanced nations were caught off guard, but they’ve been able to respond and adapt. I fear that if the same thing happened in less developed countries, they’d be unable to do the same. It appears to already be happening in Ecuador.

So far, the disease has been slow to enter Africa. This led to a rather ridiculous theory that black people were resistant in the early days of the outbreak. But Idris Elba begs to differ. As does the late Zozoro Makambe. The real reason is that there is less traffic, especially air traffic, going in and out of Africa, so there were fewer people spreading it. This is especially true in landlocked interior. This is why the parts of Africa that did have early exposure were in the more populous and highly travelled coastal areas.

The disease took longer to spread into inland areas, where the traffic is often land traffic traveling on roads in incredible disrepair. Traveling on these roads takes a long time. This slows the movement of people. Therefore, it slowed the viral invasion.

But it’s going to spread there eventually. If we were to immunize Africans so that they are far less likely to contract the virus, then they wouldn’t be in a position to have to react to a massive level of infection. Which many countries, like Zimbabwe, aren’t prepared to handle.

Now, Zimbabwe is a unique mess. Years of decline, primarily due to massive internal failures and corruption by the ostensibly social democratic ruling ZANU-PF party have left their economy in tatters. Not every country in Africa is quite this much of a wreck. But many are, and virtually all do not have the medical infrastructure to handle a crisis on this level. If we don’t take a preventative approach, then we’ll have a situation like Liberia during the Ebola outbreak, where we have to send in the 101st Airborne to sort things out. Only this time, it will be far, far worse.

Now that French doctor may have been racist as hell. Or maybe he wasn’t full racist, just a little condescending. Or maybe he was just trying to make a valid point in the most tactless way possible. I don’t care. There is a valid point buried in this. Africa can’t handle a pandemic. The same way AIDS ravaged the continent, while other places were able to manage it, should be proof enough. Prevention may be the only chance they have. If we leave it to the meager hospitals built by corrupt dictators who have spent most of their lives lining their pockets, COVID-19 might end up being the Black Death of Africa.

How The #Coronavirus Shows Us Why Health Care Is So Expensive

The coronavirus is all over the news. To the point where we’re sick of it. No pun intended. But the coverage highlights a major problem with the American healthcare system that doesn’t get enough coverage in the media. We’re constantly hearing a debate about how to pay for healthcare. Medicare for all, single payer, nationalized health care, whatever. But very few people ever talk about the supply side.

Now we’re hearing that we don’t have enough beds to meet the demand of even a moderate pandemic. And we’re also hearing that other countries don’t have this problem. At least not to the same degree. This lack of capacity is a problem for treating an outbreak. But it’s also probably a reason our healthcare system tends to suck overall.

Now, the quality of our care is generally highly rated. If you can access it. One of the greatest weaknesses of our system is just getting access to it. A big part of this is just the cost. And lack of capacity can affect this. One way this manifests is in the wait times. The United States has very long wait times, especially in emergency rooms and public hospitals, where patients can wait hours to be admitted sometimes.

But another way this can affect access is by driving up the cost of healthcare. It’s well known the United States pays way more per patient than its peer nations. And even though there are certain areas (such as cancer survival rates) that we outperform those nations, there are other areas where we don’t. Other nations achieve comparable results with less money.

Basic laws of supply and demand tell us that when supply is short, the price goes up. And when prices are too high, people can’t afford healthcare. This also causes insurance premiums to go up. The equations used to determine insurance premiums are wildly complicated, but if I was to boil it down to its simplest essence, your premium is cost times risk. The cost of healthcare multiplied by the risk that you’ll actually need it. High costs result in high premiums. And high premiums make many employers pass on insurance. And individual plans are even worse. This is one reason why so many people go uncovered.

The COVID19 outbreak may be highlighting the lack of beds and ventilators, but that’s not the only shortage. A while back I read a variety of stories about how we have a shortage of doctors in the United States. Two that jumped out at me were a story from the American Enterprise Institute and a story from Mother Jones. It should go without saying that when a very conservative outfit like the AEI and a very left-leaning website like Mother Jones agree on something, you should pay attention.

Both stories blamed the American Medical Association for artificially limiting the number of doctors in the country. Apparently, they encouraged the government to limit the number of resident positions funded by Medicare in 1997, amongst other things, claiming that we would have a glut of doctors. The opposite happened. We apparently now have a shortage. And it just so happens that American doctors are generally paid more than doctors in most of our peer countries. Short supply contributes to higher cost.

But what about nurses? In any typical doctor’s appointment, about half of your time is spent with nurses. The more they can handle, the cheaper the service, since they don’t get paid nearly so much as doctors. And it turns out, the United States has fewer of those as well. And it also turns out that there are some things that a nurse (or in some places even a pharmacist) can do in foreign countries that require a doctor in the United States. Not too long ago, I had a pharmacist prescribe a mild antibiotic for a cold. This was in London. That would never happen here in the States. I’d have to get a prescription from a doctor or at least a nurse practitioner. This means we’re paying higher rates for something other countries pay less for.

I crunched some numbers regarding beds, nurses, doctors, and cost (in thousands) per capita. The data is a couple of years old, but it’s still fairly timely. It’s typical that data like this is only available until a year or two after the measurement year. It turns out that the United States is below average on all three. We’re not necessarily the lowest in each, but it looks like those countries that are lower in some areas are higher in others.

The Japanese have fewer doctors and nurses, but way more beds, for example. Although they could be really tiny beds. These are the people who have coffin sized hotel rooms, after all. New Zealand and Canada have fewer doctors and beds, but more nurses. France has fewer nurses, but more doctors and beds. Even Italy, which is currently being ravaged by the virus, has more doctors and beds, although fewer nurses.

But one thing the United States dominates across the board in is cost. The green bars show the cost per capita, and even the second most expensive (Switzerland) is noticeably lower. The average is about half of what Americans pay.

Granted, this is quick and dirty analysis. There are lots of factors that impact the cost of healthcare. Efficiency and administrative bloat is another problem that drives up cost. And Americans generally lead less healthy lifestyles, increasing demand on the system, driving up price even further. And I could always look at the numbers of EMTs, technicians, and so forth, if I did a deep dive. But there’s no question that bottlenecks caused by low capacity are a part of the problem. And this data should be at least enough to establish that capacity is an issue in the United States.

Now increasing capacity is tricky. We can expect pushback from the AMA if we try to increase the number of doctors. They’ve apparently been trying to keep the numbers low to keep doctor’s pay high. But so what?

I remember, as a much younger man (over a decade ago), helping with the audit of a 401k for a doctor’s practice. I remember looking at the pay rates for doctors, some of them fresh out of medical school. I was originally confused. The newer doctors appeared to be making about half as much per year as I was, which was about $40K back then. Then I realized that I was looking at their monthly salary.

Now, I was perfectly comfortable earning 40K per year. These young doctors, many of whom were several years younger than me, were making 6 times what I was making. Granted, this is unusually high (this was a specialist practice, which tends to pay much more than general practice), but even GPs can make over 150K per year. If an increase in the number of doctors decreased their average pay by, say, 25%, they would all still be fine.

This won’t be easy. There are obstacles in the way of increasing capacity. Regulations may prevent us from allowing nurses and nurse practitioners, or maybe even pharmacists, from doing things that they are perfectly capable of doing, but we currently only allow doctors to do. Any time a new hospital is opened, it’s a bit of a political football, with the community and various politicians arguing over whether or not it’s necessary. And the trend in healthcare is towards consolidation. Drawing closer to monopolization usually means fewer hospitals and practices, not more. It might be a long, drawn out fight to push for more capacity.

Sure, we should work on the inefficiencies and administrative bloat. And we should all start taking better care of ourselves. It will bring the demand (and cost) down, and increase the likelihood that we’ll survive a viral outbreak. And remember when I said that insurance is cost times risk? The “risk” part is determined by assorted actuarial nerds looking at the overall health of the public and deciding how likely they are to get sick. So start working out, fatasses. Do yourself and everyone else a favor. It will make insurance cheaper.

But what we have now is unacceptable. Even if we all get into great shape, it’s clear that more capacity is definitely something we need. More doctors, nurses, hospitals, and probably technicians and clinics and god knows what else. We should cut through whatever legal red tape, whatever institutional barriers may have been imposed by special interests, or anything else that’s causing this problem and expand our capacity to meet demand. It won’t just help us survive the next pandemic. It will make healthcare more accessible to everybody.

No, the United States is Not The Worst Place For #CoronaVirus

So, just recently the United States became the country with the most cases of coronavirus in the world. And woke folks from the darkest, deepest morass of the Internet (also known as Twitter) began trashing the U.S. in a desperate attempt to out-virtue signal each other.

Naturally, it’s wildly overblown. When scientists and doctors and assorted other intelligent people look at this data, they don’t look at total numbers. They look at trends and rates. They don’t care so much about who has the largest number of cases or deaths. They look at per capita numbers.

So I decided to take the few extra minutes it takes to do some real research, instead of unleashing verbal flatulence from my frontal lobe as the wokescolds do. And a simple look at per capita numbers is all it takes to dismantle the madness of this particular crowd.

Sorting the numbers by per capita figures on the Worldmeters website shows totally different countries at the top of the list. Now the ones at the very top are a little misleading. Many of these appear to have high rates mostly because they’re just countries with small populations concentrated in relatively small areas. Even larger places in terms of geographical area, like Iceland, would have populations concentrated in relatively small areas like Reykjavik, where a third of the population lives. So these are likely special, unusual cases.

The top two in particular stand out. San Marino is a tiny little province fully within the boundaries of Italy. And the Vatican is obviously just a tiny little section of Rome. And when you consider that Italy is one of the highest large countries on the list, it’s not a huge surprise that these two places would have a lot of cases too.

So it makes more sense to just compare countries that have a high number of cases, are relatively high in population, relatively large economically, and with relatively sophisticated health care systems. The ones Bernie Sanders somewhat vaguely refers to as “major countries”.

When you piece together a list of these countries, a peculiar pattern emerges. The United States is lower than many, if not most, of the European countries. You know, the ones with ostensibly better healthcare systems. Overall we’re about halfway down the list in terms of total cases per capita and total deaths per capita. These numbers are constantly changing, though, so things might not stay that way.

Another thing of note is that with the exception of South Korea, Japan, and China, the first detected case in the United States happened before these other countries. So for us to have a relatively low number of cases, despite the fact that we had it days or weeks before these other countries, indicates that we’re doing fairly well. It’s not clear if this is due to luck, skill, or perhaps that there are many undiagnosed cases out there that we don’t know about. But it does suggest that the presumption that we’re doing worse than other countries is misguided.

Now, more than a few people have noted that the number of Chinese cases is very low per capita, despite being the apparent source of the virus. But that assumes that the Chinese government is telling the truth. The way they covered up the early stages and silenced the doctor who discovered the COVID-19 outbreak vaguely reminds me of the Soviets spreading disinformation about the Chernobyl disaster.

But even if it’s true, China can lock down easier than other countries. They are a communist country, not a free country. Although, technically not they’re not really communist anymore. They have a degree of private ownership of property and business, but with heavy state control and influence, which would technically make them fascist. Either way, authoritarian regimes can use force to lock down their populations, because they have no real interest in human rights. The free world has to do things the hard way.

Despite any early appearances of incompetence or actual incompetence, the United States is doing fairly well, based on what we know now. Of course, it could be that we haven’t peaked yet the way some European countries have. And the lack of testing might mean that the known numbers in the United States are lower than the actual, and as more of these undiagnosed cases are diagnosed, the numbers could go up rather dramatically.

But the takeaway here is that these Twitter goons are just being intellectually lazy. In their haste to piss on the United States, they decided that logic, reason, and critical thinking were unnecessary. And they completely missed the real story that the stats tell us.

Instead of bellyaching over the situation and blowing things out of proportion, maybe we should instead ask ourselves why Japan and Russia are so low. What happened there that caused them to have such low infection rates, despite their relative proximity to the source in China? The United States is not the worst, but we’re not the best either, and we should be curious about whether those countries that are did something differently or just got lucky.

The United States is not the worst place for the virus. Not yet, anyway. It’s entirely too early to get carried away with condemnations. But I guess getting carried away is what Twitter is for, so we shouldn’t be surprised.