Europe set to pass a grim milestone, 1,000,000 COVID-19 DEATHS.

[WarGamer]

Some don't seem to realize how C19 has savaged the European Continent.

973K deaths and counting.

In Deaths/1M population, the top 10 worst countries in the world are all in Europe. 16/20 of the World's worst are in Europe.

13 European countries have worse Deaths/1M population numbers than the USA

If you balance for population, Western Europe has more Deaths than the USA. (meaning add the populations of some hard hit WE countries until = approx US population)

Some European countries are struggling mightily.

France currently has the most daily cases in Europe, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are particularly struggling...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

[WarGamer]

1. surprised this sank like a ROCK. We're talking MILLION deaths, folks...

[DFW]

2. "Some" people don't live there

I do, and this is old news to me.

European countries have been sinking in their oozing mass of bureaucracy for decades. this comes as no surprise to anyone, least of all the Europeans, who, despite all this, always seem to cast their votes for a wide variety of small political parties whose small numbers guarantee that nothing of substance will ever get done or changed for the better. Everyone in their parliaments is a Joe Manchin. "Do as I say, or your precious coalition falls apart." In German elections, the major parties uncork the champagne bottles upon hearing that they broke 40% in a national election, and some of the major players let out cheers of celebration when their vote tallies "break" into two digits. If the Democrats or the Republicans ever got 40% or less in a national election here, it would be considered a humiliation instead of a triumph.

How can you expect a "union" of countries that never even get their act together on what constitutes an "apple (the EU almost lost Denmark until they relented and allowed Denmark to call a small local kind of apple an apple--true story!)" to put together a coherent plan to tackle Covid-19?

Normally efficient non-EU members Switzerland and Norway are still members of Schengen, meaning that unless they lock down their borders (done far too late), they still had to let citizens of bordering countries in. In Norway's case, this meant their huge border with Sweden, which gambled and lost with a feeble response to the virus. Switzerland has a porous border with three far larger surrounding countries (Germany, France and Italy) as well as a small border with Austria, all four of which had huge numbers of cases.

As long as their bureaucracies never had to confront anything worse than minor differences in tax harmonization, or how much poorer countries could siphon off from the richer countries, and no one had to do anything serious about defense ("Who ya gonna call? The Yankees!" ), no tearing of their silk covering was easily detectable. But once a problem as serious as Covid-19 emerged, and a pro-active, comprehensive and competent response was required, their bureaucracy of meetings and decision-delaying showed to be glaringly inadequate. Sort of like letting the Trump administration tackle it in the USA. If competent and serious action is not encouraged or offered or attempted, nothing will happen. Joe Biden came along, and we suddenly had a leader that was both interested in doing something, and in a position to do so. Suddenly it did. In Europe, an asteroid would have to smash the bureaucracy to dust so they could start anew. Initiative and innovation are dirty words in Europe. As long as that remains the case, a lack of improvement in combating the virus in Europe should come as a surprise to no one, least of all to those of us who live there.

[WarGamer]

3. thanks for your valuable input, much appreciated!

[dsc]

4. I will say my eyes were opened

I think Europe did to better in terms of mitigation measures over all but our vaccine response along with the UK's will wind up with numbers that will be in total, better. Our governmental problem turned out to be easier to, at least mostly, solve than Europe's. I hope something can be done in regards to Europe and the vaccine. I don't know the extent to which the EU parliament can be brought to bear on this, but one hopes there are plans.

[DFW]

5. Europe in gerenal did miserably. Germany has one small glimmer of hope.

Even my small town near Düsseldorf (I am visiting my daughter and her new baby in New York at the moment) has been made to lock down (again) because the new figures of daily infections have jumped from 20-50 a day to 300-400 a day, and the medical facilities are overwhelmed.

Germany does have one hope for dramatic improvement in the next five months. That is quite simply that they have a national general election coming up this September, and none of the major parties want to be seen as ineffective--even though they all are.

Merkel is retiring, so her party no longer has a leader that is not only trusted nationally, but trusted internationally. Their fractured political system is such a mess that any party that gets something like 43% (ring a bell, anyone?) would end up being the decisive victor. But none of them will.

There are now at least 6 major parties in the race, and they are all basket cases except the Greens, who seem to be close to maturing into having their growing pains behind them. The two biggest parties, now part of the governing coalition, will now be big losers, although the Social Democrats, having put up a drunken bureaucrat as their leader last time, will have a hard time doing worse than they did 4 years ago. Still, it appears they are trying. Since Helmut Schmidt was unceremoniously dumped in 1982 by his coalition partners, the Manchinesque "Free Democrats," who try to go where the grass is greenest (no pun intended), they have maybe had one strong personality in their leadership, but since she was gay, and didn't fit into their macho groove, she never got anywhere other than being on talk shows as a Social Democratic finance expert (she was).

No one wants to do business with the far right AfD (Alliance for Germany), which is basically a toxic by-product of a left that takes itself less and less seriously. The AfD are dangerous because they are getting an audience, and no one knows how to stop them, and put them back inside Pandora's box. There is also still the extreme left ("Die Linken" ), who are the old DKP (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei), remnants, the far left elements of some Greens who opposed their party's drifting to hated pragmatism after winning a few local elections, and the unrepentant East German members of the ruling SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), who still think shooting people trying to escape their socialist paradise was a good idea.

The Greens, once divided between the "fundis (fundamentalists)" and the realos (pragmatists), ditched the Fundis, and became the party of the common sense left. My bet is they and Merkel's CDU (if they don't nominate a complete fool as their Chancellor candidate) end up as the senior partners in any governing coalition this fall, and it's anyone's guess who the "senior partner," i.e. who chooses the chancellor, will be. Recently, government officials are talking about getting more people vaccinated, easing travel restrictions, by the fall. Gee, remind me again of what's going on this fall?