I’m consistently impressed by the new forms of denialism about the ongoing disaster of a pandemic response in the US (of which pointing at the death rate discrepancy was a recent, popular genre). I understand that people are fundamentally irrational, but now that many countries have gotten the disease to a manageable state, so much psychic energy in this country seems devoted to denying the validity of their approaches and coming up with new reasons why it won’t actually be so bad here, contrary to all evidence.