Whatever your media mythology may say, the reality of today, is that what most see as "reality" is a fake media created "virtual reality" -- pure media manipulation for political purposes. Since we continue our slide into totalitarianism, EVERYTHING is political! That is what "totalitarian" means -- "reality" is whatever those in power say it is.
So the narrative of the US "failing" in responding to Covid is just a narrative with minimal connection to reality.
By such rubrics, the United States, so far, has fared better than most of the major European countries—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, and Belgium—in terms of deaths per million. Germany is the one major exception. But if blame is to be allotted to public officials for the United States having a higher fatality rate than Germany, then the cause is most likely governors of high-death, Eastern Seaboard states—New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut in particular. They either sent the infected into rest homes, or did not early on ensure that their mass transit systems were sanitized daily as well as practicing social distancing.Just to be clear, just because events are USED to achieve a political result DOES NOT mean that one believes the event itself is a "hoax". The RESPONSE to the event may share characteristics of a "hoax" because the treatment of the event is well out of line with "reasonable" ( as in having some sense of things like proportion, scaling to similar events, etc).
For example, about 650K Americans die of heart disease every year. There are between 9-45 million CASES of flu in the US each year. Here is a ranking of causes of death per year -- to the extent you believe it, Corona is looking to be "Alzheimers like" for deaths. However, if someone is diabetic, dies, and then tests positive for Corona, what is the "cause" of death? It sees nearly certain that Corona will be somewhat overstated because we are LOOKING FOR IT! Many people have not seen the ISS fly over, because they were not looking -- if the look on a clear night, they WILL see it!
So we are certainly looking for Covid big time. In '18 - '19 we think we had 46-96K deaths in the US, but we were not particularly LOOKING ... if one decides to use relay team aircraft around the world flying above the clouds to "look for" the ISS, the "sightings" could rise to near infinite -- same phenomenon, different sampling. I think we can be certain that Covid numbers will be big, however like pretty much every budget / deficit, etc being "a record" (inflation, rising population, etc), or even simpler, my achieving a "personal record age" on each birthday, any number without context is just a number.
A "reasonable view" (note, not necessarily "correct", just common sense rational) would be that past flu was likely quite vastly under reported relative to Covid since there was a lot less focus on testing for it, and Covid is heavily over reported. How much? No real way to perfectly know, but I'd guess "big", in if normal flu was tested like Covid now is, most years would see 100's of millions of cases to even billions, and deaths in the millions. Around 60 million people die in the world each year ... pretty small changes in reporting of diagnosis and causes of death can VASTLY change people's perceptions.
TB kills order 1.5 million per year, and it is a bacterium, masks would be very effective ... don’t tell anybody!
A billion $ is still a decent definition of "rich" for a person, however since a typical human brain has 86 billion neurons, one would be in a sad state if they had "only" a billion neurons! We won't even talk US debt and obligations -- order $150 TRILLION!
As Stalin said, "One death a tragedy, a million is a statistic". Actually it is much worse than that -- 60 million babies aborted isn't even a "concern" to most. 50K ish and rising suicides in the US is of a lot less concern than Covid, and the suicide deaths are YEARLY and RISING!
Pretty much any death outside of those you know, or those that are canonized by media isn't even "noise" -- we MUST filter reality since it is simply too large for our brains. The best we can do is be aware of how vulnerable we are to narrative and choose our filters wisely! You likely recognize the name of George Floyd, but not David Dorn ... that is because you are being manipulated by a media narrative -- we all are, all the time.
It is all about the narrative, and right now, the narrative is all about defeating Trump.
The truth is that the COVID-19 epidemic, the lockdown, and the rioting were seen by the Left, the media, and now the Democratic Party as a renewed effort in this election year to do what Robert Mueller, Ukraine, and impeachment had not—abort the presidency of Donald Trump, or make it impossible for him to be reelected.