🐱 Europeans Say COVID-19 Revealed America as 'Fragile,' Inconsiderate

https://www.newsweek.com/europeans-say-covid-19-revealed-america-fragile-inconsiderate-1523860

Many Europeans are asking if Americans even care about their people's own health, as they have watched in astonishment at the world's most powerful country faltering in its response to the coronavirus pandemic.


Italians, Germans and residents of other European nations who were hit the hardest by the coronavirus outbreak in February said they are disappointed, saddened and even frightened by the United States' COVID-19 response. Public health experts and everyday residents said they "always saw America as a model" for the world, but the pandemic has exposed a country with horrendous infrastructure and no coherent public health system.

Several European doctors agreed with their U.S. counterparts in saying Americans' individualist spirit has backfired and led the country to the top of both infection and death toll lists.


Americans are now at the top of the list of "at risk" travelers to Europe after countries like Italy — which placed themselves in a strict 10-week lockdown — have emerged from the pandemic while Americans continue infighting and rising above 160,000 dead from COVID-19.

"Don't they care about their health?" a mask-clad Patrizia Antonini asked the Associated Press about Americans as she walked with friends along Lake Bracciano, north of Rome. "They need to take our precautions ... They need a real lockdown."

"We Italians always saw America as a model," said Massimo Franco, columnist with daily Corriere della Sera newspaper. "But with this virus we've discovered a country that is very fragile, with bad infrastructure and a public health system that is nonexistent."



Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza, one of the country's top public health officials, outright condemned President Donald Trump and Washington lawmakers' response to the virus as "wrong." Italy now sees about 150 to 300 new cases nationwide each day, down from the 6,500 daily the country recorded on March 21. In the U.S., there are about 54,000 new cases a day — which is a higher number proportionally when its larger population is factored into consideration.


As of Sunday, the U.S. now has a world-record 5 million confirmed coronavirus infections amid a politicized debate over face masks and health precautions, which has incredulous Europeans questioning the country's leadership on the international stage.

"Had the medical professionals been allowed to operate in the States, you would have belatedly gotten to a point of getting to grips with this back in March," said Scott Lucas, professor at the University of Birmingham in England. "But of course, the medical and public health professionals were not allowed to proceed unchecked," referencing Trump's undercutting of his administration's own public health experts.


Doctors throughout Italy, where the virus killed more than 35,000 people and ravaged towns between late February and April, say the country's strict nationwide lockdown was a major factor in beating back its spread. Additionally, Italian government officials on both the national and local levels worked primarily in lockstep as they conducted widespread testing, robust contact tracing and a slow process of reopening.


"If you are in Florida and you hear your governor saying something, and then the governor in New York is saying the opposite, it's really difficult. In Italy, it was just one voice," said Dr. Roberto Cosentini, head of an emergency medicine unit at the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, Italy, as reported by NBC News.

Newsweek reached out to the Italian and German embassies in Washington for any additional remarks as well as the White House Sunday morning.

 

[Stoneheart]

The US is much larger, sparsely populated with "flyover states". Each state in the US is pretty much its own country for stuff like this, and each state with major urban areas will have their own individual flare ups.

beeing larger means its easyer to isolate the infected...

And the Eu did not fail Spain and Italy?

No, Spain and Italy failed Spain and Italy...

Sure Hungary did but that belongs to Hungary not the eu!

the US is worse than Spain and Italy, and Spain or Italy are run by monkeys.

the well run european countries did alot better than the US or the people of south europe.

combating Corona is very easy, be clean, follow orders, dont be lazy and go hiking into the woods on the weekend.

than there is a genetic factor, sweden has okayish death rates while they did nothing. thats the baseline for homo sapiens invictus, every country above that line should look into eugenics...

 

[Iwasamwillbe]

What's the point of rights if they can be revoked at any time?

Safety is more important than freedom, especially when it involves the super-deadly coronavirus. Don't you care about grandma?

 

[TowinKarz]

Been a while since we've had a shamepiece about how backwards last-millenia America should be more like Europe, they really wanted to make hay out of the fact that surely with Orangeman at the helm, the US would be flicked aside as Europe showed how it was done - and promptly fell apart when the UK decided to stop bending the knee to out-of-control progressive socialism and Brexited, leading to months of bickering over who fills the shortfall in the finances they swore didn't really exist. (remember , according to the Remainers the UK was a net USER of EU funds , they'd bankrupt themselves if they left! Strange how now there's a multibilion Euro hole in the finances, they should be swimming in cash if what they said was true)

You want to talk about fragile and inconsiderate? Macron is your poster boy, his country is on an almost two-year spanning riot over the mismanaged welfare state and what's he doing? He's whining that another sovereign nation can't deny French fishermen their RIGHT to fish in another person's ocean...

I imagine they've been particularly chuffed for 3 years, unable to call out what they see as the worst thing ever across the pond when all the icky nationalist things that "don't happen here" are being spiritually if not actually duplicated in their own backyard just off the coast of France as the UK embraces national populism and fails to FAIL immediately.

So of course they jumped on Covid.... it was a breath of fresh air since the last 10 or so hitpieces were all about racism and lack of common sense gun control causing mass shootings, which don't happen in Europe! (We have mass stabbings and arrest you for speaking ill of Pakistani rape gangs, THAT'S how you do it!)

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

What exactly is this supposed role model that these people supposedly speak of?
Certainly not the insanely expensive, substandard healthcare system, that impoverishes people, while it offers longer waiting times for medical procedures at lower quality.

 

[No. 7 cat]

Article (like most @CatParty articles) in three words: Orange Man Bad.

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

I wonder if these same Europeans realize or stop to appreciate that their opinion does not matter to us. If you're this scared and pissed off, spend that time on yourself and your loved ones you fucking moral police.

In my limited experience, a lot of Europeans fundamentally don’t understand how large the US is and how that colors our internal politics. The only other peoples alive that understand constructs of that scale are Russians, Chinese, and Brits old enough to remember the Empire. I also think that a lot of the EU’s problems are them hitting the realities of trying to establish such a thing festering alongside their incredible self-importance. If the Slavs and the mongrel Americans can do it why can’t we?

 

[Stoneheart]

You want to talk about fragile and inconsiderate? Macron is your poster boy, his country is on an almost two-year spanning riot over the mismanaged welfare state and what's he doing? He's whining that another sovereign nation can't deny French fishermen their RIGHT to fish in another person's ocean...

thats what France has been doing for the last 200 years... but you had to save them twice...

 

[Hollywood Hitler]

160,000 (most of whom were well over 70) dead out of a population of ~330,000,000 isn't bad. I'd call that a success. These people need to stop worrying about wearing masks and social distancing, and get back to normal life. The virus isn't going anywhere, stop living in fear and embrace the loving embrace of Corona-chan. And stop worrying about grandma, the boomers didn't take into consideration the future they left you when they took a reverse mortgage on their house so that they can go on RV road trips instead of leaving it to you.

 

[Meat Target]

160,000 (most of whom were well over 70) dead out of a population of ~330,000,000 isn't bad. I'd call that a success. These people need to stop worrying about wearing masks and social distancing, and get back to normal life. The virus isn't going anywhere, stop living in fear and embrace the loving embrace of Corona-chan. And stop worrying about grandma, the boomers didn't take into consideration the future they left you when they took a reverse mortgage on their house so that they can go on RV road trips instead of leaving it to you.

Any time you see someone quoting the death toll, tell them to divide that by the number of infections. The percent of deaths from Covid among those infected is in the single digits.

 

[Syaoran Li]

The health care system and cult of indidualism don't really allow the Us to face the pandemic as well as other countries.

Muh rights muh freedom

The issue is that the United States is larger and more spread out in its population compared to the majority of Europe.

Plus, we have a more federal system as opposed to a unitary one precisely due to our size. The BLM coup has no doubt driven up a lot of the infection rates, and I still think China has the most deaths and infections given how their government lies about everything, They just want to shit on the US and roll out the welcome wagon for the CCP.

 

[TowinKarz]

I'm sure the Germans are partying in the street like Oktoberfest over the fact that the dirty and barbaric US is withdrawing it's troops....

Put your money where your mund is, Mein Herr.

 

[AnnLurker]

Aren't these the same kinds of people that bitch about world overpopulation? You'd think they'd love more plagues. I think it's just because they are afraid they will be on the chopping block instead.

 

[Fanatical Pragmatist]

beeing larger means its easyer to isolate the infected...

This would only be true if there were uniform population distribution and density across the whole geographic area.
It also neglects increased use of travel.

Aren't these the same kinds of people that bitch about world overpopulation? You'd think they'd love more plagues. I think it's just because they are afraid they will be on the chopping block instead.

They just say that because they want to kill babies and make themselves feel self-righteous at willing failing the goal of every living thing & the most basic biological meaning of life (to reproduce).

 

[KingCoelacanth]

beeing larger means its easyer to isolate the infected...

No? How are hot zones like NYC, LA, Miami, etc. going to be easier to isolate due to the size of the country? If anything it'll be much more difficult for the US to isolate since restricting interstate travel in the US is much harder than restricting international travel in Europe

 

[Ledian]

If there's one thing people as a whole forget about the USA is that it's not one literal country. It is on a federal level but in reality, the US is a union of 50 individual states that all do things differently. They all respond to things differently. Taking a metric of the whole on something in the USA that's not being dealt with federally is a crapshoot. One state could have almost no deaths and another 25,000.

What it should be more apparent is that certain states are more dysfunctional than others. The 10th Amendment is both a blessing and curse at times but it's the devil we deal with for our freedoms.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I don't need a world wide catastrophe to say that Europeans are faggots.

 

[TowinKarz]

If there's one thing people as a whole forget about the USA is that it's not one literal country. It is on a federal level but in reality, the US is a union of 50 individual states that all do things differently.

They also don't get that the Feds have to abide by that 10th Amendment..... That that the Federal government in the US can be incredibly strong on taxes and matters of trade and finance, but ultimately weak when it comes to forcing local-level change, is, pardon the pun, foreign to a lot of outside observers.

They don't get that the Feds can control ports and such, but NOT have any say, really, on what happens on Main Street, if the Sheriff won't enforce a mask order, the Federal government has no power or authority to remove him, that really makes Europeans scratch their heads.. how the supreme executive power can't unilaterally strip an on-paper "inferior" law enforcement agency of authority if it doesn't fall in lockstep. How can the body that has the power to declare war on another country NOT have the ability to override a guy named "Clem"?

Or how some things, like freedom of speech, not only cannot be regulated due to Constitutional law, but said Constitution can't be amended on a whim by congress... they don't get that "Just make guns illegal" isn't a viable solution because the law itself, as soon as it would be written, would be illegal and unenforceable in itself due to the pre-existing 2a. Again, the idea that people at the top can't do certain things, escapes them. How the people who make the rules CAN'T make certain rules... even in "emergencies" or even for "hate speech" really doesn't seem to get through to a lot of casual observers, even in THIS country.

 

[F/lying Frankenstein]

This article is a laughable failure at trying to find imaginary reasons why Europeans could look down on the U.S.
I mean, yes, they could believe what the article say, but that would mean that they know the internal and natural challenges of the U.S.

In my limited experience, a lot of Europeans fundamentally don’t understand how large the US

If I may add, it is even worse when you consider that Europeans know shit, and I mean shit about how your institutions work or how power is shared within your republic, or even why does it work as it does. ( The basics, geography and 20th century U.S history is covered in high school, but you better major in English in college to learn more )

Talking with a French perspective in mind, you need to know that the intellectual elite ( that speak in the medias , and usually are not specialized in U.S affairs) still believes that your Second Amendment is followed to the letter uniformly, and that State law or the ATF do not exist. That's how ill-informed the most listened fuckers in France are. And when they talk about politics, the crushing majority take the side of the Democrats, never that of the Republicans.

Ill-informed and politically one-eyed: You have the root of why articles like this might be true with heavy editorializing from the journalist, and also why I think it is bullshit.

Most of the time, there used to be two stances regarding the U.S: Blind obedience and admiration of a system that is never studied ( Because freedom )or rabid and powerless hatred of the "Empire" that wages war everywhere ( Far-leftists, of course ) .

Things change nowadays, of course, and the perception of the U.S has evolved,

Thanks to Trump who was honest enough to force the american-loving intellectuals ( Atlantists, they are called ) to turn their obsessions toward their idea of European Federal Union or how Russia is the eternal enemy against whom we should cry wolf, or how a European army is needed.
But also thanks to alternate ways of learning, on Youtube and elsewhere.

Finally, the idea of an opposition between U.S and Europe is a legitimate one, and that truthfulness makes it important for our stupid leaders and intellectuals to claim moral and material superiority to hide their mounting incompentence and failures.

Because a giant like the U.S has, ultimately, little need for allies, and only a real one for markets to corner ( Given that you are self-sufficient ).
There are legitimate reasons for Europeans to be wary of the state-assisted type of Capitalism that U.S firms that operate in Europe have.

But this article is controlled opposition, built on ignorance, meant to hide the European leaders' failures on far more critical issues and divert the opinion of their citizens.
Sorry for the rant, this type of article just fucking annoys me. Infrastructure is a constant battle, not something that you can prattle about like this, in the middle of the pandemic.

Edit: A word

 

[Unassuming Local Guy]

By deaths per capita, 7 of the top 10 countries are in Europe. Same with case-fatality ratio. If you compare all of Europe to America, Europe's case-fatality ratio is over twice that of America's, though America's deaths per capita is about 60% higher, almost entirely because of a small cluster of states in the New England region.

Basically, Americans are more likely to get it, but are less likely to die from it once they have it. The news never talks about this disparity since it runs counter to the narrative that American health care is awful and the only way to fix it is to vote blue no matter who.

 

[quickthrowaway]