There is probably no better day than today to show the cost in COVID-19 deaths for the politicization of the United States’ response to the coronavirus pandemic. Why today? Because today the Republican Party is going to anoint once again, the man who was responsible for politicizing the response to the coronavirus pandemic here in the United States.

Larry Ludlow, you were wrong when you told us on Tuesday night that “presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the COVID virus.” As a supposed economic and analytical genius, you embarrassed yourself with that kind of talk—using terms like “extraordinary rescue” and “successfully fight” to describe the United States’ response to the pandemic.

You don’t believe me? Then let’s go to the “real charts” and look. 

The chart below shows the actual seven-day running average COVID-19 death count in the United States to date with a very conservative estimate projected forward to election day. Look at the chart carefully.

Note that I have drawn a line around the July 7^th timeframe where the COVID-19 death count started back up after about a three-month decline. If we had “extraordinarily rescued” our COVID-19 response instead of following the red-line upward, we would have followed the green-line downward. 

On what basis do I say this?  It is based upon the “extraordinary response” to health crisis by countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Italy. The area between the red-line and the green-line from July 7^th to the present accounts for 36,000 COVID-19 deaths!

Yes, thirty-six thousand COVID-19 deaths that were unnecessary if we had simply followed the pattern of countries that we used to consider our greatest allies.

Using a very-optimistic, non-conservative projection (the gold line) moving forward to election day, shows another 24,000 COVID-19 deaths that can be attributed to our mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.  In total, that will bring the cost to 60,000 unnecessary COVID-19 deaths.

Still don’t believe me?  Well then, let’s look at it from a non-conservative viewpoint using the chart below.

The above chart shows the seven-day running average COVID-19 deaths for the United States and the five countries I mentioned above combined-together as one. I chose those five-countries because the population of the five-countries when combined is essentially the same as the United States. There are several things you can draw from the above chart. 

First, you should note that Europe was hit harder and earlier by the pandemic than the United States. This reality explains why the East coast of the United States (i.e., New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, etc.) was hit the hardest early here in the United States. Even though the origin of the pandemic might have started in China, most of our virus came from Europe.

Second, Europe responded differently to the coronavirus than we did here in the United States. Europe jumped on the coronavirus and took it very seriously while our leadership in the United States downplayed it. Our leadership, by their own actions, downplayed the use of masks, downplayed the use of science, and downplayed the long-term seriousness of the virus.

Third, the non-conservative cost in COVID-19 deaths can be estimated by the difference in the death count between Europe (i.e., the five-above countries) and the United States since around the first week of May. A non-conservative, but still valid way to estimate the cost, would be to assume that the United States would have performed as well as Europe after the first week of May. We did not. And if you add the difference in death counts between Europe and the United States since that first week in May (when the 7-day running average was the same for Europe and the U.S.) to the present, you get a difference of 64,000 politically unnecessary deaths, 28,000 more than the more conservative estimate of 36,000 as previously mentioned. By the election day, the number will be more like 100,000 politically unnecessary deaths.

So, regardless of which way you want to look at it, conservatively or non-conservatively, the response to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States has been shameful and unnecessarily costly—both in human terms and economic terms. 

I remember a day when a sitting President took himself out of the political arena because of his association to fewer American deaths tied to the Vietnam War. Tonight, we get to hear from a President, who takes no responsibility for his response to a crisis of a different and more deadly form, asking us to ignore real facts and bless him with a second-term.

Go figure.  How times have changed.