Forty Percent of America’s Coronavirus Deaths Were Avoidable: Lancet Study

Around 40 percent of the Americans who have been killed by COVID-19 might have lived if better political decisions had been made before and during the pandemic, according to a new Lancet study. The paper, titled Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era, rips into former President Donald Trump, saying he “brought misfortune to the USA and the planet.” It describes Trump’s response to COVID as “inept and insufficient,” though it says the roots of the nation’s public-health problems go much deeper. Mary Bassett, a Lancet commission member and director of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, told The Guardian: “The U.S. has fared so badly with this pandemic, but the bungling can’t be attributed only to Mr. Trump, it also has to do with these societal failures.” The paper estimates that, had America’s virus death toll matched up with the rates in other high-income G-7 countries, some 40 percent of deaths could have been avoided. Almost 470,000 Americans have died so far.