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Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

The Covid crisis showed perfectly just how broken the US is. The country in its current state is hopelessly divided, terribly corrupt and it doesn’t have a functioning government or healthcare system. Politicians and civilians seem to pride themselves in making dumb and arrogant statements that show their lack of knowledge and experience. Democracy seems on the chopping block too. Trump is a major cause of this broken image, but for my generation it really started with the potential vice president Sarah Palin.

As a European I can say that the only people who still look up to the USA as a great country are the people who base their views on Hollywood instead of the news.

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I don't know what generation you are, but for my generation it started with Newt Gingrich and the "Moral Majority"'s intentional stonewalling and dismantling of government.

It definitely goes back to at least Reagan saying that government is the cause of all of our problems, but it's probably earlier than that. I have a vague recollection of Nixon saying something similar, but can't remember the details.

There's a great podcast about this: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/662/transcript

To me the most interesting part was about how Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan were pretty close friends:

"Then one day, I picked up the paper and read where he had made a statement about me that was pretty harsh. And I called him, and I said, Tip, I thought we had a relationship here, where we could do business together. And, oh, now, I read in the paper that you said--

And he interrupted me and said, well, buddy, that's just politics. He said, after 6 o'clock, we're buddies. We're friends. I did take it that every once in a while, when we had a meeting, I would visibly set my watch at above 6 o'clock."

I wouldn't be too quick to point to Covid as evidence of anything, yet. Unless you are just wanting to say that we have a very divided landscape. Even then, used to be there were lynching and other horrid acts. I wouldn't claim we are past all horrors, but nor do I see any reason to think they are actually getting worse. Just more light on them. (And I am hopeful that that is a good thing, for the arc of progress.)

As far as COVID, comparing handling and numbers at this point is silly, IMHO. Wait until the full effects of the pandemic have been seen, measured in years, not months.

As for America having an f'd up past? You bet we do, but so does much of the rest of the world. Much of the rest of the world likes to bury it under a rug and pretend like it didn't happen. We acknowledge bad things happened and try to learn and grow from those points.

Everyone just loves to make America a punching bag, because it's so easy to throw jabs at the big guy on the block. It's pretty much become expected than any comment section will somehow segway into how horrible America is. At this point we don't really give a darn what the rest of the world thinks about us.

> I wouldn't be too quick to point to Covid as evidence of anything, yet.

It's evidence of something. The US covid response is a distinct, notable, and quite frankly disastrous outlier in the industrial world. No one handled this as badly as we did, objectively.

Shouldn't we be looking for an explanation for that? And maybe taking lessons that might hold for other things we're doing badly?

Without a counterfactual, it is hard to know what could have made it better. I'm personally very sceptical that we know what could have made things better. This is while still being dismayed at how crappy leadership has been.

So, I think we'll know more in a few years. Hopefully we learn enough that we make better choices next time. As things are standing though, my money is on prior exposure to corona and sars being the largest contributors to places that have "done better." And we aren't out of the woods, yet, as it were.

If that is the case, most of what we are seeing is just more evidence that the majority vote lost out last time. Such that now we are seeing the majority is still upset about that.

> Without a counterfactual, it is hard to know what could have made it better.

You realize there are dozens of other nations that saw the same virus, right? That seems like a nonsensical response to me, as if you're asking "Well, who could have known?". Well, Germany. Germany seems to have known. Also Japan, Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (especially those guys)... Even nations like Spain and Belgium, which had disastrous early outbreaks got it under control at a time when we had a huge second wave.

You really don't think we have anything to learn from that data?

> my money is on prior exposure to corona and sars being the largest contributors to places that have "done better."

Uh... what? Let's ignore the pseudoscience argument and just talk demographics: you're saying that the United States, alone among all nations in the industrialized world, was unique in that it had no prior exposure to pre-existing coronavirii. Everywhere else in the industrialized world, every nation, had large pre-existing immunity? That's what you're going with? And you think that makes sense?

There is decent evidence that the US did a worse job than other places. That I cannot and do not disagree with. What we don't have is evidence of what exactly would have been different if the US did other things. So, in that, we don't have perfect counterfactuals and I think most of the news has been more speculation on how much better it could have gone than folks are admitting to. There is also the chance that things would have been just as bad as this basically no matter what. (The cynic in me asks "could native populations have just followed social distancing to save themselves from measles and smallpox?" The answer could be "yes", but that feels off to me.)

I'll ignore you being a jackass, and claim I am not saying we are alone in anything. This is a global pandemic of a novel virus. That is not really in dispute. The US is marked in how the numbers are, and there is every chance we remain that way. I just have a hard time reconciling much of the news of how contagious this is, with how well anyone contained it, without using something like vaccination. That would make this not just a novel virus, but a new one that has been contained in ways that we have never contained a virus before.

> my money is on prior exposure to corona and sars being the largest contributors to places that have "done better."

What are your thoughts on how Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Italy and Spain have handled things?

Well, first off, my thoughts are pretty worthless here. I'm doing a "my money" wager where "my money" isn't that much. :D

That said, I haven't checked on numbers a lot lately. Just checking quickly, Spain seems problematic in that they are growing again in cases. (Am I looking at bad data?) Italy is also growing, just somewhat masked by how giant their initial wave was.

Which is all to say, I suspect some places have done something "right" to contain this. I'm not convinced we know what that thing was, yet. Is akin to folks saying beer was drank because the alcohol made it safe. Really, it was the boiling of the water, but the evidence was hard to separate those.

So, to that end, I am not calling for reopening or anything of that sort. So, please don't take my scepticism for that.

> The US covid response is a distinct, notable, and quite frankly disastrous outlier in the industrial world. No one handled this as badly as we did, objectively.

I don't think that assertion holds up. Our economy didn't contract as much as others, our per/capital death rate isn't the worst, we blocked international travel sooner, etc.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/393903/

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

The US is probably one of the most globally interconnected countries also, which epidemiologically speaking is probably a worst case scenario. This is my speculation though, not sure I've seen any reliable information in this regard.

This thing is not over, and the US per capita death rate is not good. In fact it is one of the worst, and you cannot ignore the fact that we still have a huge number of active cases whereas much of the rest of the industrialized world has reduced their case numbers significantly to manageable levels that allow contact tracing and fast turnarounds on testing. The US is still adding to our death rate and case numbers aggressively. Other countries are not. This is what makes the U.S. a disasterous outlier.

And don't ignore the long term impacts either. Just because you the U.S. has a low mortaility rate does not mean the disease will not have long term effects. People may die sooner, or suffer significant health effects later on that leave a lasting mark on the economy.

You suggestion that this is because the US is so interconnected is a foolish one. Europe is quite interconnected, has had similarly bad initial outbreaks, but has subsequently been able to address those outbreaks much better than the U.S.. What would you say about the politicization of preventative measures that we know work - wearing masks and social distancing?

> a huge number of active cases whereas much of the rest of the industrialized world has reduced their case numbers significantly to manageable levels that allow contact tracing and fast turnarounds on testing. The US is still adding to our death rate and case numbers aggressively. Other countries are not. This is what makes the U.S. a disasterous outlier.

It isn't an outlier by any statistical definition that makes sense to me and you are glossing over the way aggressive testing changes the "case numbers" and also aren't being clear if you are talking about "case numbers" or "cases per 1000 tests" or "cases per capita". These details matter in order to have a coherent discussion about the numbers.

> our per/capital death rate isn't the worst

It's close to the worst, though. We're sixth among industrial nations. And moreover that's down to luck: we had a terrible initial outbreak in New York, just as other cities like Milan, Madrid and Brussels did. And if you look at those metro areas, in fact NY is the worst. But we're a big country so the initial deaths were lower as a fraction.

But then what happened? We went to sleep as a huge second wave crested, and everyone else got it under control. So while it's true that we're still behind other nations in deaths, we're catching up rapidly, while their outbreaks are nearly flat (though starting to trend up a bit in many places -- they should watch that).

Give us a month at the current death rate and we'll have passed everyone but Belgium.

I was responding to this statement:

> No one handled this as badly as we did, objectively.

Now if you want to change the goalposts and talk about "close to worst", fine, but let's agree you are changing the goalposts. And of course everyone ignores the fact that we have no idea what the real numbers were in China.

> Give us a month at the current death rate and we'll have passed everyone but Belgium.

What does this even mean? It can only mean that you are trying to count total deaths, I think, which is a meaningless statistic unless you scale it to the population size.

Within the US, the numbers are terribly skewed due to deaths in nursing homes and assisted living facilities in and around NYC. If you consider our national numbers when those outliers are removed things look vastly different. But if you do that you would have to start being a bit critical of some decisions made by people with (D) after their name on TV and of course we all know that is to be avoided at all costs. Much easier to pretend that President Trump failed in some way.

> if you want to change the goalposts and talk about "close to worst", fine

I didn't say deaths though, I said "handled", so if there's any goalpost motion it seems to be on your part. Some cities just had bad initial outbreaks. Madrid didn't make better policy decisions than Berlin in February/March, they were just unlucky.

But in April/May, we knew how this virus worked, mostly. And, mostly, nations around the industrialized world made policy decisions designed to contain it. And it worked.

With one very notable exception. I'll say it again, and stand by it: No one handled this as badly as we did, objectively.

> It can only mean that you are trying to count total deaths, I think, which is a meaningless statistic unless you scale it to the population size.

Clearly I was talking per capita and extrapolating the current curve out. Here, check for yourself: https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

See how the total deaths per capita are quite flat now across all industrialized nations? See also how the USA is... not?

Have you been watching India's numbers?

> As a European I can say that the only people who still look up to the USA as a great country are the people who base their views on Hollywood instead of the news.

Basing your view on the "news" is a huge mistake. Mass media portrayal of the US (or really of any country) is much closer to a constructed narrative than a transparent view of "reality".

Do you think US "news" portrays Europe accurately? (honest question)

Stronger: For the last several years, the US has been the target of a disinformation and agitprop campaign. (Or more than one. And it doesn't really matter if the origin of the campaign is domestic, so you have to count the Republican and Democratic machines, which both paint a picture that things are terrible, and our side is the only one that can fix it.) That doesn't make it easy to form a realistic assessment of how good or bad things are...

I Love America. I don’t think the problems you describe are unique to the US.

> ‘and it doesn’t have a functioning government or healthcare system’

Can you elaborate here? I can have no job or health insurance, and I can obtain treatment at the hospital.

Likewise, I participate in city council and roundtables with city and state officials. They listen to the community and policy changes are affected based on that. Govt seems to work pretty well locally. Federal govt is not relevant at that level.

Could it all be better? Sure. But your hyperbole is a bit much.

> I can have no job or health insurance, and I can obtain treatment at the hospital.

For emergency care, yes. Not for an MRI or a hip replacement or dialysis or physical therapy or cancer treatments or prostheses or cataract surgery or...

This is this weird myth that won't die. It's absolutely true that emergency rooms are universally required to treat anyone who walks in the door. It's also true that ER care makes up something like 3% of US health care delivered.

"I can have no job..." 50 million people in the US are on Medicare or Medicaid, and can and do absolutely receive those services, based on age or income level. The ones who cannot are those whose income is too high for those service and choose to forgo or cannot afford health insurance.

And then pay deductibles and co pays and god forbid your out of network.. your making excuses for a broken system which most of the 1st world surpasses in almost every way

I'm not trying make excuses for a broken system. I'm just trying to add some information that the poster I was replying to may have lacked. I'm not making a value judgement. Those on medicare/medicaid generally have low to no deductibles and co-pays. Those with private insurance may have large deductibles and out of pocket expenses. I certainly do, but I have multiple people in my household with chronic health issues.

My family of 5 pays just 240 euro’s per month. That covers everything.

You can obtain emergency stabilization treatment at a hospital and nothing more, this is paid for by other's insurance payments. Perhaps you live in some idyllic utopia cut off from the rest of the country. Maybe you don't require any mail delivery as you live in an Amish farming community and eschew technology, or a whites only wealthy retirement community with your every wish catered for like the ad I just saw. The real U.S. is becoming a dystopian nightmare for a large percentage of people. Ignoring it is what is a bit much.

I’ll be clearer. Your healthcare system is laughable in comparison to many countries and the federal government hasn’t gotten anything done in the past 8 years.

> As a European I can say that the only people who still look up to the USA as a great country are the people who base their views on Hollywood instead of the news.

For many in the US, the opinions of Hollywood and the major news outlets are equally inaccurate and irrelevant.

Consider that the US is more comparable to the EU as a whole than any individual country in the EU, and a lot of things regarding US politics start to make more sense.

The United States is best viewed as 50 little countries. Culturally Louisiana is as different from North Dakota as France is from Sweden. Our federal government is increasingly powerful, but State sovereignty isn't just a paper promise. The States retain significant real authority and can effectively rebuff the federal government if the political will exists. For better or for worse though, the power of the States has been on a downward trajectory for over a century. Nevertheless the strong fiscal, monetary, and military union between the States has been hugely beneficial in most respects.

The EU on the other hand is broken by design[1]. It appears to be largely forgotten now, but the framers of the EU were well aware that monetary union without fiscal union was unsustainable in the long term. They, perhaps unwisely, assumed that reasonable compromises would be reached in relatively short order.

[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n19/wynne-godley/maastri...

As an American, I have to say I agree and it is sad and frightening to see.

It has been a long-time coming that the US has been getting more and more stagnant and unable to do certain things. It's like we've been on a freighter headed for an iceberg, and the rudder is broken so we're all just watching it in slow motion. Look at infrastructure projects, healthcare, college costs, housing, global warming, etc. They've been obvious, impending issues for decades and we've just sat by and done nothing while they become bigger and bigger problems for more and more people.

Still, at least in my opinion, America has continued to have a "superpower" of innovation in other, less constrained areas. Many of the brightest, most ambitious people in the world have continued to come here and do amazing things, as they have for the past century.

And when things have been truly dire even fairly recently, like the '08 financial crisis or even 9/11, we've managed to take action and address it. In hindsight there were obviously major flaws to our responses to those things, but they were over-reactions rather than inaction, and were arguably still better than doing nothing (with the notable exception of the war in Iraq, but that had a lot of more complex causes and wasn't necessarily America's direct response to 9/11).

For me personally, this is what makes the current moment so devastating to watch, and why I have started feeling like this time is different. We've had one of the top 5 biggest threats of American lives in all of history with Covid-19, and the federal response has been just ignoring it. On top of that, we're now going full steam ahead on shutting down or severely limiting immigration. That strikes me as just about the most idiotic, and profoundly un-American thing I can think of.

These things take time to cause major shifts so I am hopeful we still have a couple of years to correct the course before the effects start to compound too much, but it feels like a particularly fragile time and the future could go either way at this point.

> As a European I can say that the only people who still look up to the USA as a great country are the people who base their views on Hollywood instead of the news.

Not sure what to say about this - I don't think anyone believes what America is on the basis of Hollywood. America is 50 states and depending on which state you're referring to - quality and standard of living, incoming, happiness, etc varies. It is like looking at the state of Romania and basing your views about Sweden, both EU nations.

I went to visit LA 10 years ago. I somehow expected nice roads and well maintained infrastructure, because that is what you see in the movies. It was a shock for me to see how shoddy everything looked.

Definitely, American infrastructure is crumbling in big cities. It is really bad. Roads in SF have pot holes everywhere, the whole thing smells. It is awful.

Did you visit Lake Tahoe and any of the National Parks? The country side infrastructure usually is excellent and well maintained.

Certain states are better - Colorado and Utah have excellent roads even in the cities. Phoenix, Arizona is same.

Considering that the US is so corrupt, with non functioning government and/or health care systems, why are EU per capita death rates close to the American ones? In the presumably more competent, wealthier, and more generous Western European nations, a majority of them have death rates which exceed the US. Why?

Furthermore given the significantly greater number of cases shouldn't US death rates be significantly greater if it's healthcare system is non functional?

America is still in the top 10? And I think the big difference is all the other countries are well past the peak while America is accelerating into a second just as bad as the first?

Europe appears to be also accelerating into a second wave as well[1].

[1]: https://time.com/5876132/europe-coronavirus-second-wave/

Why compare EU countries to the US? Why not countries with states?

Okay, fine let's compare country to country: The UK, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, and Spain all have worse if not significantly worse mortality rates per capita [1]. Why have they performed worse than the "terribly corrupt" and nonfunctioning government and or healthcare system of the US? Furthermore France, while having a lower mortality rate, is still within 10% of America's. That a whole lot of Western Europe right there which doesn't anything to show for your implied superiority.

That's not to say there aren't European countries which have done better, there are: Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, have thus far have significantly lower death rates per capita. How can you off handily suggest that the US is non functioning and broke while still beating countries which make up half of the EU, by population?

[1]: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Ask again in 3 months.

Might I temporarily diverge from the immediate topic at hand and ask you views on the Romani people?

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