Today the United States has reached the tragic, staggering figure of one million deaths from Covid. Photo: RTVE.es
It will not be easy to forget the first victim of Covid in the United States. It was February 29, 2020, a date that only comes every four years, right in the middle of Donald Trump’s administration. In rural Connecticut, where traditionally “boredom” was the number one killer, things had changed dramatically. Opiates reigned supreme, an unprecedented massacre had occurred at Sandy Hook School with 28 massacres, and to end the world as we knew it came the pandemic. I still remember seeing a sign on a farm that said “Let’s destroy China because they attacked us with this virus” next to another sign that said “Let’s make America great again” (MAGA). Fascism defiant and proud of its ignorance in all its glory.
Today, the tremendous hubbub of Homeric lies and fabrications about the Ukraine crisis is being used, among other things, to distract, belittle, or obscure the significance and societal impact of having reached the tragic, staggering figure of one million deaths from Covid-19 US . And by many hundreds of thousands more unidentified victims of Covid in the United States and other advanced capitalist countries; of whom it is not known with certainty from what evil they died.
Covid death figures are from Worldometer at federal, state and many county levels across the United States. It includes not only the so-called “51 Entities”, i.e. the 50 states and the District of Columbia (the capital Washington DC), but also 10 other entities (Puerto Rico, Guam, Veterans Hospitals, the Navajo Nation, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, overseas military, federal prisons, American Samoa and a tourism cruise ship on which seven Americans died (several US citizens died in Wuhan and others were repatriated from the PRC in the early stages of the pandemic), which represents almost 30,000 more deaths, officially included There is broad consensus that the reality is significantly higher, we only consider in this letter what is statistically quantified.
This article is not about epidemiology, but about inequality and death.
What does a million dead mean?
There are no scientific methods, not even reasonable methods, to measure the scale and cruelty of that million dead figure, just as there is no way to measure that of a war. The number of people who died in wars is just one of many terrible and visible expressions of the suffering caused. Table 1 compares deaths from Covid-19 in the United States to those from wars this country has participated in. All figures are from the US Department of Defense.
Table 1.
Source: United States Department of Defense.
Deaths from Covid-19, another expression of social inequality in the United States
1% of the population owns half of the world’s wealth, stressed a relatively recent study that highlights the widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of the citizenry. According to the 2017 Global Wealth Report prepared by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, the wealth of the world’s richest people rose from 42.5% at the height of the financial crisis that began in 2008 to 50.1% in 2017, a number it hasn’t a lot has changed until now.
But, that 1% with half the wealth only taxes a small fraction of the income of the states in the different countries of the world.
In the United States, it is 23% (2018), while the middle class and poor (62 million households) contribute 24.4%. In 1970, the wealthiest Americans paid more than 50% of their income, including all taxes, twice as much as the working class. In 2018, after Trump’s tax reform, the very few billionaires paid less than the very many workers for the first time in 100 years. So simple and cruel.
Military spending must be severely cut and the resulting budget used to meet some of what is needed for education, health, climate change adaptation, and other actions vital to humanity today.
The world’s military budgets consume (2021) about two trillion dollars, and these are only the officially recognized numbers, which are considered to be well below the real numbers. The United States is more devoted to militarism than the sum of the nine countries that follow it combined.
Both raising real taxation on the top 1%, which earns and owns half of the world’s wealth, and slashing military spending (and other spending that doesn’t contribute anything to society) could net the United States about $3 trillion immediately per year for a sensible redistribution into socially important and sensible households.
- increase in social crises
The impact of the pandemic on fair social requirements will be very clear, the need for health insurance will move from a necessity/desirable to a sine qua non. The American Democratic Socialist leader Bernie Sanders was able to put it in a few words: “Health care is a fundamental human right.” This, an enduring truth, will also be a legacy of the virus.
The legacy of this crisis extends to insights and affirmations: more work from home, electronic payments boom, tighter border controls, much more access to education (including distance learning), the need to create tens of millions of new jobs, and a long etcetera.
Considering the populations of the United States and Cuba, some very impressive numbers can be observed:
Table 2.
Putting the numbers per 1 million people, the United States had 2.55 times more cases and nearly four times more deaths than Cuba. J. Oro table using CDC and Worldometer data.
table 3
It is not just the United States but several of the most advanced capitalist countries that have the worst Covid indicators and inequality is a key factor in these countries. J. Oro table with data from CDC and Wolrdometer.
The richest and most powerful country on earth is incapable of protecting its citizens the way blockaded Cuba is doing. What is happening is that many of these citizens are stepchildren rather than children.
Inequality in the United States has two main characteristics:
1. This extends to practically every aspect of social life. So we see inequalities in education, public health, job opportunities, or obtaining financial loans and mortgages, and many other areas of life.
2. Inequality is growing, the data analyzed from 1929 to the present only shows a tendency to increase the distance between those who “have” and those who “don’t have”.
“To have or not to have”, a determining factor for “survive or die” in times of a pandemic. Reuters photo.
In the horrific pandemic, inequality is manifesting itself in ways surprisingly close to other indicators, that is, minorities suffer much more from Covid infection and death, as seen in the tables below.
We want to say that obscurantism, superstition, and extreme forms of conservatism have in some ways caused a significant number of infections and deaths among white populations because of their resistance to vaccination. Without trying to simplify things, A significant number of supporters of D. Trump and other conservative sectors or extreme religions have refused to be vaccinated, with the obvious consequences.
Table 4.
This table shows a basic index of inequality, namely income inequality by household. Taken from UnitedStatesCensus (I).
Table 5.
Census Bureau data (I) The table shows income inequality between population groups in the United States.
Table 6.
Taken from CDC and ApmResearchLab.
Table 7.
The pandemic has shown that inequality is not just economic. Image with APM RESEARCH data.
Grades.-
(I) The United States Census Bureau recently reported that it omitted a portion of the Black, Hispanic, and Native American population from its 2020 statistics, specifically 3.3% of African Americans, 5 percent of Latinos, and 5.6% of Americans Native Americans and Alaska Natives. For this reason, in this article we have used the figures given for 2019, which are considered to be more accurate.