For the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, and will continue to demonstrate in the future, that America is one of the unhealthiest countries in the industrialized world. Critics on the right and left harp on how the pandemic was handled, but in fact the dismal outcomes in the U.S. do not reflect management of the crisis so much as our underlying health as a country.
With the caveat that the actual figures from China are unknown, in the past three years, the U.S. is the only country in the world that has suffered more than 1 million deaths from COVID-19. The U.S. death total exceeds that of every other country, except Brazil, by more than half a million. Even when normalized for population, the U.S. per capita death rate is just outside the top 10 in the world and rising steadily.
This is not the result of the policies of President Donald Trump or President Joe Biden. Nor does the explanation for the high number of U.S. deaths lie in an abnormally high case total compared with other countries. In terms of confirmed cases per capita, nearly one-third of the countries in the world have more than the U.S., and this just represents diagnosed and reported cases. Most countries, including the U.S., acknowledge that since the extremely contagious omicron variant emerged, between 80% and 90% of their populations have been infected.
