As the world continues to grapple with the day-to-day horror of Covid-19, some are trying to throw forward from the current morass and see what the future might look like.
London-based writer Umair Haque is one such. He filed the following article on medium.com on June 27, yesterday. It is too long to reproduce in full here but i've lifted a few excerpts to provide the flavour.
headlines: "How Bad is America’s Coronavirus Explosion? Much Worse Than You Think.
"America Has More New Coronavirus Cases than Europe, China, and India — Combined
Umair Haque, June 27
"Yesterday, there were about 167,000 Corona cases reported worldwide. America had 41,000. That’s about 25 percent. America had 25% of the world’s Coronavirus cases today — and that number’s rising — and yet it has less than 5% of the world’s population.
"Are you seeing what a colossal failure this is? It isn’t just one of the greatest public health failures in modern history — it’s one of the greatest failures, period.
"So how will all this evolve?
"As the (US) economy goes into depression, something even more bizarre will begin to happen. Because no real effort has been made to contain the virus, because Americans have to simply bear the risk of the pandemic themselves, they will have to work and venture out and so forth. That means the pandemic will probably go permanent. Unlike in much of the rest of the world, which has beaten back the virus, it will become a kind of new illness that’s just a part of daily American life, like the flu, only worse. You got Corona? Too bad.
"That’s just yet another risk of living in this failed society — like having no healthcare, savings, retirement, another way that you have no safety or shelter from failed institutions and systems.
"America will be one of few countries in the world which never really beats Coronavirus — it will enter a kind of permanent viral winter.
"As Coronavirus goes permanent in America, the world will have to quarantine it. That’s already begun: Europe and Japan have already discussed closing themselves to Americans."
the article continues at medium.com. It's disturbing stuff. Americans always imagined isolationism as their choice. That's unlikely to be the case in the future.
