Tunisia outperforms the United States in significant respects? — COVID

© 2020 Peter Free

 

17 April 2020

 

 

Background — American nurses are bearing the brunt of the United States' COVID-19 epidemic

 

Their situation illustrates how badly, even criminally run this country is.

 

We might as well be an economically undeveloped country, regarding how poorly our medical workers are protected from COVID-19 — as compared to their Asian and European equivalents.

 

Virtually every day, an American nurse is shown on television explaining how dire the profession's personal protective gear situation is.

 

Not to mention how many hospital administrations are actively — quasi-murderously, in my legal estimation — interfering with nurses' efforts to protect themselves.

 

 

Michael Brenner presented a contrast

 

From Tunisia:

 

 

Face masks, including ones that actually provide protection, are readily available throughout East Asia – and elsewhere.

 

[R]elatives in Tunisia are mailing me N95 masks which they purchased in their neighborhood pharmacies.

 

Indeed, as of April 8, Tunisia had produced by their own resources, and distributed 30 million masks to a population of 11 million.

 

The equivalent here [in the United States] would be 1 billion masks!

 

In America, we are offered instructions on how to sew a (probably useless) mask out of discarded T-shirts.

 

Hospital directors fire nurses who buy their own equipment . . . .

 

[W]e blind ourselves to the realities of other nations – because to do so is embarrassing . . . and because we compulsively retain our dogmatic faith in American superiority.

 

© 2020 Michael Brenner, Ranting in a Time of Plague, Moon of Alabama (17 April 2020)

 

 

The moral? — Rage is, I think, I constructive reaction

 

We might even get something societally beneficial done for a change. Provided that more Americans begin to act in tune with this nation's 'can do' historical heritage.

 

Accomplishing such a formerly 'normal' American goal would, of course, require eliminating most of the United States' nation-trashing leadership.

 

We could charge these avaricious, callous and self-aggrandizing folks with Can't-Do-Itis.

 

Then, we would medically isolate them atop the Pacific Ocean's two gyres of trashed plastic.

 

The metaphor appeals on multiple levels.