Coronavirus meltdown: Why April 7th must go down in infamy
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Covid has now killed nearly 1 in 900 Americans in less than a year.
How is it that in Australia it’s 3 out of every 100,000 people, and in New Zealand it’s 1 out of every 200,000 people, but here in America we’re dropping like flies?
Chalk it up to Republican racism.
We started out behaving as if we were actually committed to doing something about Covid.
Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.
By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to 22, but that was enough to spur federal action.Trump’s official emergency declaration came on March 11th, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome that week.
The Dow collapsed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration. Jared Kushner even put together an all-volunteer taskforce of mostly preppie 20-something white men to coordinate getting PPE to hospitals.
But then came April 7th, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.
Other media ran similar headlines across the American media landscape, and it was heavily reported on cable news and the network news that night. Most of the people dying were Black or Hispanic, not white people.
American conservatives responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?”
Limbaugh declared that afternoon that “with the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component.” And here it was. “The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder — harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody, disproportionate representation.”
Claiming that he knew this was coming as if he was some sort of a medical savant, Limbaugh said, “But now these — here’s Fauxcahontas, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris demanding the federal government release daily race and ethnicity data on coronavirus testing, patients, and their health outcomes. So they…
