美国确诊近85万例，死亡4.6万例！经济学人：为什么美国的死亡率这么高？（附视频&解说稿）
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据约翰斯·霍普金斯大学实时数据显示，截至美国东部时间22日16:38（北京时间23日4:38），美国新冠肺炎确诊病例为842319例，死亡46399例。
早在2月份，就有人预测，美国大概率确认人数突破100万，现在来看，美国突破100万已经成了必然事件，要完成这个壮举可能仅仅再需要几天的时间！
截止到4月22日11时，美国累计确诊820104例，现有确诊692256例，单日新增23577例，累计治愈82676，累计死亡45172例，美国累计确诊破82万，死亡病例破4.5万，疫情非常严峻，并且美国的疫情目前还没有到达最高峰，还没有出现拐点的现象，所以离疫情的结束还遥遥无期。
美国确诊人数多，同时死亡率不断升高，作为世界头号强国，有世界上最发达的技术，最发达的医疗资源，但在疫情下，却有些像皇帝的新衣一样，被无情的揭穿！
4月22日，英国《经济学人》特别制作了9分钟分析视频，详细分析了为什么美国的新冠肺炎的死亡率特别高？
America is now the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic America has passed the grim milestone of 20,500 deaths to overtake Italy as the world’s worst-hit nation.
Many blame the president for the scale of the crisis These are the lonely times for a president All the decisions come to you.
And he’s made just about all of them wrong But the causes of America’s failings in dealing with the virus run far deeper Independent of Donald Trump, America is a country that always would have found fighting a pandemic to be difficult regardless of who the president was.
When the novel coronavirus hit America President Donald Trump’s administration was slow to act Early on the president was, you know, reassuring Americans that things would not get so bad.
We have it very much under control in this country ,We had 12 at one point and now they’ve gotten very much better.
He seemed to be worried about the stock market and its vacillations And I think that there was a series of critical weeks in which the threat was underplayed.
The administration’s initial complacency was set to store up problems for the weeks ahead There was a sense that we didn’t need to develop the amount of ventilators that we had the number of personal protective equipment that could go out to doctors.
And what we find now is that we’re in the midst of kind of a national shortage of those things On March 9th the Trump administration promised millions of test kits crucial to monitor the spread of the virus.
Yet, by the end of the month only around 200,000 tests had been completed This is a serious thing and right now the federal government is failing But this failure wasn’t entirely down to President Trump’s inaction.
Thousands of Americans may have been exposed to the coronavirus but have not been tested The first tests created by the Centres for Disease Control a federal agency, didn’t work Private and academic labs around the country tried to develop their own tests but were initially hampered by strict regulations and a laborious approval process,That’s a technical failing and a bureaucratic failing that perhaps could be laid on the president.
But one of the things about America is that public-health authority is incredibly devolved to states and cities in terms of how they respond so that the federal government actually can’t order these things America’s federal system grants states the authority to decide when and how to respond in a public-health crisis like this pandemic.
And every state has responded differently The state’s 90m residents are being told to stay at home as much as possible Faced with an escalating crisis the governor of New York announced a state-wide lockdown on March 20th.
We’re going to put out an executive order today New York state on pause,We need everyone to be safe otherwise no one can be safe, On the same day in Florida spring breakers were revelling on beaches If I get corona, I get corona At the end of the day, I’m not going to let it stop me from partying.
Here, there would be no lockdown for almost another two weeks During which time the virus continued to spread across the country Some states called for non-essential businesses to be closed and for people to stay at home much earlier than others.
The fact that borders remain open between the states complicates efforts at containment While some states might have, kind of, shut down at this time you know, California, Washington, Oregon if a resident from there goes to Florida and then comes back you can see how it could exponentiate from there.
That’s the weakness of a system that relies on decision-makers in 50 states and numerous jurisdictions A virus doesn’t respect state lines And efforts to halt the spread of the virus have been impeded by another aspect of America’s political system Democrats, what do they do? They want to use a deadly virus as a political weapon against the president.
Partisan politics are crippling America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Politics has infected America’s handling of the outbreak Republican and right-leaning politicians have been slower to impose restrictions than Democrats.
I am pleading with you to stay home Stay home unless it is necessary for you to go out Part of the reason that is it starts in cities, so it’s taken off in places like New York and Seattle and California.
And these are places that tend to have Democratic mayors tend to have Democratic governors When political scientists, kind of, try and account for the rate of infection, how rural your state is and all the rest They still see that Republican governors are slower to implement social-distancing measures.
There is even evidence that Americans’ adherence to the rules crucial to halting the spread of the virus is also being influenced by party loyalty.
So you see, at least from what we can measure from cell-phone data Republicans seeming to take social distancing less seriously than Democrats.
This blanket spread of shutting down businesses it’s an economic disaster for Michigan and people are sick and tired of it GPS data show that Democratic voters in the 2016 presidential election have cut travel more than Republican voters In Hawaii where the majority voted Democrat in 2016 people more than halved their travel in March In Wyoming where the majority voted Republican travel actually increased slightly It’s supremely unhelpful for response to a virus to be politically polarised because the virus, obviously infects whomever it can.
On April 11th America overtook Italy to become the worst-hit country in the world The damage the virus is causing in America is compounded by the nature of its health-care system American hospitals are a business much more so than in other parts of the world.
There’s no financial incentive for hospitals to have extra beds in the ICU, or extra ventilators, or extra pulmonologists who can specialise in intubation. Only 305 of America’s 6,000 or so hospitals offer the most intensive treatment available,That’s if patients even make it to hospital, Roughly 12% of Americans don’t have health insurance.
Around 23% of those who do have insurance are underinsured which means they could be hit with high charges More than half of working-age people have health insurance through their employers But now with over 20m Americans claiming unemployment many may lose that access If you have more people afraid of getting treatment then you know, the mortality rate might be higher than it ought to be.
All of those things mean that a pandemic would have strained the American health-care system quite a lot no matter who was president The Trump administration has promised some help to those who don’t have access to health care.
Today I can so proudly announce that hospitals and health-care providers treating uninsured coronavirus patients will be reimbursed by the federal government using funds from the economic relief package Congress passed last month.
Yet there are still a lot of unanswered questions about exactly what and who is covered by the federal fund For much of America, the peak of the coronavirus pandemic is not yet in sight.
On April 16th President Trump presented a set of guidelines on how and when social-distancing measures could be lifted He made it clear that the next move is up to each individual state.
Every state is very different They need to remain closed we will allow them to do that And if they believe it is time to reopen we will provide them the freedom and guidance to accomplish that task Yet the president immediately undermined his own guidelines by showing support for a growing protest movement demanding an end to lockdowns.
These are people expressing their views I see where they are and I see the way they’re working They seem to be very responsible people to me Donald Trump has presided over, and done much to encourage America’s disjointed response to the pandemic.
The combination of an erratic president federalised government and a complex and fragmented health-care system means America’s already high death toll will continue to mount I’m Idrees Kahloon, I’m the US policy correspondent for The Economist I’ve been writing about how coronavirus has been affecting Americans of all stripes.
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