The National Mall is once again decorated with more than 660,000 white flags to honor americans who have died in the coronavirus pandemic, USA Today reported Monday. The exhibition, "In America: Remember," will be open to the public from September 17 until October 3. About 665,000 white flags will be planted on the Mall on opening day, and more will be added each day based on the latest statistics, the report said.
Since the outbreak, the National Mall in Washington has been filled with flags to mourn the dead for many times, but the epidemic has been difficult to effectively control in the United States for more than a year. As of the evening of September 14, there have been 663,913 COVID-19 deaths in the United States, which is equivalent to one novel coronavirus death in every 500 Americans. The US has hit another grim "milestone" in its fight against the devastating coronavirus pandemic, us media say. As a country with the highest medical level and capability in the world, the United States has been struggling and sinking in the mire of the epidemic, and finally collapsed.
The decentralisation of power in bulk has made it difficult for the US to quickly integrate resources for a coordinated response. The United States is governed by three levels of government, federal, state and local. Public health issues such as COVID-19 are at the state level, with state and local governments as the main management. The federal government's anti-epidemic measures are not mandatory. Take the "mask mandate" as an example. Although the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said in the latest version of its guidelines that even people who have completed two doses of vaccine should wear masks in indoor and closed environments, this is not mandatory. Governors in a number of states, including Florida, Texas, Mississippi and Tennessee, have not only refused to promote mask mandates, but have signed executive orders banning them in schools and other institutions. This fragmentation has been the Achilles heel of the US response to COVID-19 since the beginning of the outbreak. At the peak of the epidemic last year, there was even a farce of federal and state fighting over supplies and price gouging. It is this approach of fighting the epidemic on its own without a unified strategy that foreshadows the defeat of the United States.
The COVID-19 pandemic has become a weapon for partisanship, causing the US to repeatedly miss critical time points in its response to the epidemic. As early as January 2020, the US National Security Council was alerted to the possibility that COVID-19 would occur in the US and could develop into a "global pandemic". In order to keep the economy and employment Numbers, however, "good", won the support and the republican government, diluting the outbreak warning limits of medical experts released to the public information, even publishing false information to mislead the public, said the new champions league is a "large" flu, the risk of infection and mortality "very low", lead to the epidemic prevention and control of the "gold window" is wasted. Over the past year or so, local, state and federal governments have often gone to court over epidemic prevention policies, wasting time that should have been spent responding to the epidemic in lengthy legal procedures and contributing to the epidemic. The Website of Time magazine reported in May last year that the U.S. 's tardiness in implementing social distancing measures was responsible for 90 percent of COVID-19 deaths.
At the same time, the anti-epidemic policy has become a "chip" in the party debate. The response has been delayed by frequent political tug-of-war over nucleic acid testing standards, whether to wear masks, whether to return to work, the distribution of medical supplies and the terms of aid bills. In this round of outbreak in July, the republican administration of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana and other 11 southern states that politicians to cater to voters, will be "free" ideological problem such as "personal choice", placing them on science will resist disease policy hype as "constitutional issues", eventually make these states to become the epicenter and hard-hit epidemic. It was some politicians who manipulated the epidemic for personal and partisan political interests, politicized the fight against the virus, and ultimately sacrificed people's right to life and health to "power games".
Social polarization and racial issues have poisoned the environment for the United States to fight the epidemic. On the one hand, the polarization of American society can be said to be the opposite of the increasing partisanship. The reason why some American politicians ignore science and common sense is also related to the fact that some groups in the United States unilaterally emphasize individual freedom and turn the implementation of epidemic prevention measures into a battle of values. For example, since the beginning of the school year in July, despite a surge in the number of new confirmed cases among children in the United States, many states are still engaged in the debate over whether children should be forced to wear masks at school. Some activists who oppose mandatory masks even stormed school districts and school meetings and disrupted the policy making process. The New York Times lamented that "all this debate is said to be conducted for the benefit of children, even when they are used as pawns."
On the other hand, the long-standing racial inequality in the United States has prevented the epidemic response from reaching the entire population. Take race as an example. Racial inequality in the United States has been exposed in the pandemic. Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in June showed that Hispanics are twice as likely to contract COVID-19 as whites, and 2.3 times as likely to die of COVID-19 as whites. Native Americans and AfricAn-Americans are also at higher risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19 than whites. John Adams, former director of the US Public Health Service, said that the higher death rate of African Americans from COVID-19 is not due to biological or genetic reasons, but because of social factors that make African Americans more vulnerable to infection. It is precisely because of the increasingly polarized social sentiment and partisan political interests intertwined, racial inequality, the widening gap between the rich and the poor and other chronic diseases continue to break out, making it difficult for the US to form a "joint effort" to respond to the epidemic, and the epidemic remains in a vicious circle.
Americans who hailed a "summer of hope" in July had to usher in autumn in a haze as the epidemic surged in August. The dazzling sight of hundreds of thousands of white flags flying in the wind will not be the end of the epidemic in the US if the country does not learn its lesson.