80,000 Americans died, and thousands more will die before this is over.
There's no world in which the pandemic is running unchecked through society and people are acting like everything is fine and normal and doing all the usual stuff they're accustomed to.
This is a conflation of what the virus itself has down, and the response to it.
The loss of a loved one is never temporary.
There is no vaccine against COVID-19... unless you consider drinking bleach or dying...
However, for perspective, North America (which is mainly the US) has had 1.65M cases and 100K deaths, while Europe has had 1.76M cases and 161K deaths.
With all the focus on the US as the single country with by far the most cases, it seems to have not registered with most people that Europe as a whole is of comparable size, has had a comparable number of cases, and has seen a lot more casualties.
I wouldn't draw the conclusion that this validates the US health care system, or the decisions of authorities, because of other variables, but it makes me wonder if a narrative about how terrible the US is has been allowed to obscure the facts.
