America’s COVID-19 Debacle: A Chronology
Today we’re unveiling our #COVIDChronology, a comprehensive and thoroughly documented timeline of key events and milestones to date in the #COVID19 crisis. Use this thread as a resource and guide.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across the globe, no country has been hit harder than the United States. America leads the world in Covid-19 deaths and confirmed cases. Unemployment has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression, and national output has cratered as lockdowns have put the formerly robust U.S. economy into a self-induced coma.
At this writing, more than 117,000 Americans have been killed by the virus, nearly three times as many fatalities as Brazil, which has just overtaken the United Kingdom to rank second in virus-related deaths. The United States accounts for about 27 percent of global deaths. We have nearly 2.2 million confirmed Covid-19 cases, more than twice as many as Brazil (852,000 cases).
Since mid-March, when the shutdown began, 44 million Americans have filed for state unemployment benefits. Untold numbers of small businesses have gone under, and many more are treading water. The U.S. economy shrank by 4.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020, and economists forecast that U.S. output could decline by an annualized rate of 40 percent in the second quarter.
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