1812年1月（比拿破崙同志統帥法蘭西大軍進攻沙皇俄國還要早五個月）創刊號發行《新英格蘭醫學期刊》至今，已經過去了208年之久，從未參與過美國政壇兩黨之爭、據說世界範圍醫學領域最權威、江湖地位最高大上的一本雜誌，昨日打破歷史傳統，編輯們撰寫、以社論形式發文，高度讚美中共國戰疫功績同時，例數川普治下美國政府控制疫情的種種不是，一塌糊塗，全面失敗，疾呼美國全體選民醒悟起來，同仇敵愾，抄起你大選選票的手中武器，把總統川普趕下台！
原標題本來並沒有前面四個字，上谷歌搜索一看，Wow !
幾乎全世界的英文媒體都是一呼百應 ......
Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.
The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering,1 the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.
We know that we could have done better. China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay. These measures were severe but effective, essentially eliminating transmission at the point where the outbreak began and reducing the death rate to a reported 3 per million, as compared with more than 500 per million in the United States. Countries that had far more exchange with China, such as Singapore and South Korea, began intensive testing early, along with aggressive contact tracing and appropriate isolation, and have had relatively small outbreaks. And New Zealand has used these same measures, together with its geographic advantages, to come close to eliminating the disease, something that has allowed that country to limit the time of closure and to largely reopen society to a prepandemic level. In general, not only have many democracies done better than the United States, but they have also outperformed us by orders of magnitude.
