The U.S. coronavirus response “is getting awfully close to genocide by default,” Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves tweeted last May—several hundred thousand deaths ago.
Gonsalves’s use of the term genocide is dramatic. But the scale of the death toll in the United States is on a par with genocidal actions of the past. Stalin’s man-made famine in Ukraine is believed to have killed 3.9 million Ukrainians over two years, 1932-33. The Irish famine resulted in 1 million deaths over seven years, from 1845 to 1852. Researchers at Columbia University compared the Trump administration response to COVID-19 to the response of other nations and estimated that the ineffective strategy in the United States resulted in 130,000 to 210,000 needless deaths over less than a year.
