this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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I shared this with a buddy and he responded with his favorite.
It doesn't even say what year that is, which is just bad practice.
If it's 2020, that steep curve is because it took till March for it to reach the US.
I get that the point is to criticize his handling of it, but there are plenty of honest ways to do that without using misleading statistics
It's obviously 2020 because it starts at basically zero cases. Also it's weird that your expect rigor from memes.
Not American. I know he didn't handle it well and spread misinformation, but how much worse did the USA have it compared to the rest of the world? We all had it rough regardless of our leaders, so can any of it really be attributed to him?
To be clear, I think he's incompetent in so many ways and is perhaps the worst thing to happen to world politics since WW2. I'm just saying covid was out of everyone's hands, how different could it have really been if he handled it better?
Yes, he is incompetent and policy-wise he could have done a lot to flatten the curve. I wasn't trying to vindicate him, I was just saying the skate-park-like graph was a little misleading without basic statistical context like what year it was referring to, and whether the number of cases was in the US or worldwide, etc. I think it's entirely possible to criticize and even ridicule him while still being intellectually honest, and showing the initial increase at the onset of the pandemic is just not good practice.
I get that it's just a meme, but I prefer a basic standard of integrity. Otherwise, what really sets us apart from the right-wing troglodytes?
Generally the US just did nothing helpful at a federal level and the Republican party took an ideological stance against preventative measures like masks or social distancing, which meant a large portion of the country went out of their way to avoid such measures or even ban businesses and local governments from implementing them. Schools and universities had their funding threatened if they required masks. I was a grad student / TA at the time and the most we could do was put up flyers that said "please consider wearing a mask, it's not required" and 0 of my students wore them. We had elderly professors retire early because they didn't want to die over such stupidity.
I was in the suburbs where we didn't really get hit until the second or third wave when vaccines were already rolling out, so I didn't have it that bad.
I think a lot of the disconnect regarding the mask mandates was between urban and suburban/rural populations. The more spaced out people were, the less risk there was, but everywhere was trying to issue blanket policies between urban and rural areas.
Like I get it, people who live in densely populated cities can't understand why anyone wouldn't wear a mask. That makes sense, cause they're used to so many people being crowded together, and they can't imagine living somewhere more sparsely populated.
But some people live in areas where you can go for a walk and never come within twenty feet of another person, so it's a little different for them. Not just because of the social distance, but also the risk of passing someone infected is just generally lower in those areas.
And then there was the whole tail-end of the pandemic, when nearly everyone was already vaccinated, there weren't as many infections and the infections there were weren't as severe, yet so many places kept mask mandates in place even a year or two later.
At some point, a lot of people just wanted to return to normalcy. A year of social distancing has a substantial impact on people's mental health, but nobody was considering that in their cost-benefit analysis. It was always "in an excess of caution." Sometimes an "excess of caution" is just too much caution. At some point, we could have just treated it like the flu.
Society never fully recovered from the pandemic, to be honest. There's a collective trauma that we all just ignore, but it's a lot harder to meet people and make new friends than it was before.
The calls to return to normalcy came at the height of pandemic related deaths and so we stopped testing, stopped reporting, and pretended the pandemic was over when it wasn't. I will never forget when a large portion of the population decided the lives of the vulnerable mattered less than "normalcy."
Again, I think those calls were coming from suburban and rural populations who weren't hit as hard and probably could have gotten by with less restrictive measures than what was necessary in urban areas. People from the city don't really understand that not everyone everywhere is packed together like sardines, but there's no reason why the same degree of caution would be necessary in areas with a fraction of the population density.
Not everyone who disagreed with how things were handled was a trumper. I guess someone who's never left the city wouldn't be able to tell the difference though...
You write like you didn't lose anyone in your life to the pandemic. Must be nice.
The US has the 17th highest deaths per capita and covid was the 3rd largest killer in 2020, behind cancer and heart disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_States
Not per capita they had the highest number of deaths and highest number of confirmed cases (and experts think that actual cases are much higher due to a lack of mass testing and a shortage of tests)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory
The US certainly treated the issue horribly. It became a bizarre political misinformation campaign.
At the same time obesity and mortality from covid have a strong correlation. In wealthy countries it is one of the top factors. Helps explain your stats. Still might have been better with getting vaccines and masking of course.
Kowabunga
Kowabunmer dude