Not that over 200K deaths this year attributable to # in the US is anything to celebrate. A small number of those deaths are people related to me, so I don’t celebrate it at all.

However, I think that we look at the 200K deaths for a nation with 330M people in it and compare it with nations that have a fraction of the number of people. Of course we’re going to have more infections and more deaths than they are.

The only way I can see for our numbers to be significantly lower would have been for all 50 state governors plus territorial governors and the DC mayor to have simultaneous “no leaving your home for any reason on pain of gunshot” and “no inbound or outbound travel allowed” policies for a month or so. As soon as you have variations in the time period and strictness, or as soon as you allow travel between regions and nations, you make the lockdowns less effective.

I say this because the federal authorities used require state and territorial governors to take charge of the efforts and limit the feds to assisting them.

I don’t mean to say that Trump is not an idiot, nor that his administration couldn’t have done a better job. They could and should have, but even if we had another president, state-level decisions and disobedience by “freedumb” people are the primary reasons that so many people in the US have been infected and so many have died.