COVID-19 death toll in US surpasses 1918 flu

By Monday, the COVID-19 death toll in the United States was over 675,000, more than the number of deaths in the US during the 1918 flu pandemic.

The figure is astounding for a country that rose from being just another Western country a century ago to becoming the world's sole superpower. But despite having the most advanced medical technologies and facilities in the world, its response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been woeful.

US politicians, who care little for people's lives, are to blame for the state of affairs in the country. When the novel coronavirus began spreading in early 2020, China and the World Health Organization alerted all countries, so they could take the necessary pandemic-prevention and control measures, but US politicians paid little heed to the warnings.

While China mobilized medical resources and ordered lockdowns to bring the pandemic largely under control, the US vacillated between ordering lockdowns and keeping the country going.

After China and the US developed vaccines, China joined the global vaccine initiative COVAX to ensure that developing countries, especially least-developed economies, have equitable access to the vaccines, but the US kept its vaccines to itself, adopting a beggar-thy-neighbor policy that undermined the global fight against the virus.

It is the US politicians' failure to take action at the right time that is responsible for the high death toll in the country.

As for the 1918 flu, there is little evidence that it originated in Spain. In fact, there is a consensus that it originated among US soldiers, but US politicians hushed up the issue, so as not to dampen the troops' morale. That is how the flu spread around the world. Spain was simply the first country to report it, earning itself a bad name.

A century later, the US is still playing its dirty games by repeatedly calling for virus "origin-tracing" studies in China. Instead of doing so, the administration should reflect on the past that had US politicians responded appropriately to the pandemic, many American lives could have been saved.