Academic

CORONAVIRUS: The America Lasters Face Europe?s Second Wave. Europe has now surpassed the Unite?

By Glenn Reynolds

CORONAVIRUS: The America Lasters Face Europe?s Second Wave.

Europe has now surpassed the United States in daily coronavirus cases. That presents a challenge for the Democratic politicians and left-wing commentators who have, for the past several months, made unfavorable comparisons between the United States and Europe yet another arrow in their quiver to shoot at President Donald Trump and to illustrate the alleged superiority of European governance, health care systems, and social cohesion.

In early September, Joe Biden bemoaned the way Europe had outperformed the United States in its handling of the coronavirus. Speaking to a crowd in Wilmington, Del., Biden compared death tolls in the five largest European countries and the United States, asking, “Why weren’t we doing what needed to be done?”

Spain’s cases per person had, at the time, already surged past the United States; a few weeks later, France followed suit. Today, the United States and the European Union have the same number of cases per capita; Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom all report higher rates. Europe, it seems, wasn’t doing what needed to be done after all.

Don’t expect to hear anything about this from those who profess to follow the science and to venerate data. We expect them to ignore science that undermines their political objective?defeating Trump?and to keep insisting, against the evidence, that America has it worse.

To the America lasters, the coronavirus crisis is further proof that the United States is backward, incompetent, and inferior to Europe’s rational, technocratic, socialist paradise. To them, American lives lost to the deadly disease weren’t a tragedy?they were another opportunity to score points against Trump.

To be fair, everything for them is about scoring points against Trump.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on October 17, 2020 (boomark / email).