COVID-19 keeps proving everyone wrong

Our coronavirus culture war is no match for the virus

Earth.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

America once again broke its own record last week for daily confirmed cases of COVID-19, with over 90,000 new cases on a single day. That's almost certainly not as many cases as we actually had back in the worst days of March when testing capacity was almost nonexistent and the virus had been raging essentially unchecked for weeks through the Northeast. But it is clearly worse than the summer surge through the Southeast and Southwest. And while the current wave is hitting Midwestern states like Wisconsin hardest, in every part of the country, from Texas to Massachusetts, numbers are rising, and in an accelerating fashion.

It's a terrible and depressing state of affairs. So imagine how we'd feel if the numbers were more than two and a half times worse — if, instead of 90,000 new cases a day, we had nearly 250,000. Because that's what America would look like if we had the same number of new cases per capita as France.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.