The Guardian on Tuesday published an opinion article pointing out that the existence of 520,000 COVID-19 related deaths exposes "a basic failure" of the U.S. national security.
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The article’s author is William Barber II, a protestant minister who stresses that the U.S. government was unable to protect its citizens against a deadly pathogen. In midst of the pandemic, he recalls, 87 million U.S. citizens are uninsured or underinsured.
"We have not simply suffered a disaster. This disaster has unveiled dysfunction in our society," he said.
For a long time in the U.S. public life, people have accepted the "simplistic framing of any attempt to establish justice or deal with systemic inequality" as a far-left issue, he added.
The half a million COVID-19 deaths demand "a grown-up conversation about the policies" that shape people's public life, the author wrote.
"It is insulting to a people who have lost half a million parents, grandparents, siblings, and partners to continue talking about the root causes of a national crisis in simplistic terms that do not fit the reality we can all see," he noted.
Previously, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) informed that life expectancy in the U.S. plummeted by an entire year in the first half of 2020.
The U.S. remains the worst-hit country by the pandemic. As of Friday morning, it has recorded 29,056,463 COVID-19 cases and 520,911 related deaths. These figures account for roughly 25 percent of the global cases and over 20 percent of the global deaths.