On Thursday, we hit a grim watershed. The US overtook Italy and China as the country with the highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases. This is a dire crisis and an extraordinary failure of President Donald Trump. Americans are suffering and dying because the Trump administration failed to act quickly and decisively to prevent the virus' spread. The US has now seen about 1,195 deaths and the number is rising rapidly.

On Thursday, the US saw an increase of more than 15,000 cases in one day—a shocking surge that can be explained by both the spread of the virus and increased testing after weeks of shortages—pushing the total number of confirmed cases over 82,000 . China, in comparison, has reported 81,285 cases.

There is a fundamental difference between China and the US. China has broken the spread of the virus with a lockdown that first started in Wuhan on January 23 and is now being lifted in stages; only a few dozen new cases are allegedly confirmed each day, and most of these are apparently introduced from abroad. The US has not broken the epidemic. And if Trump has his way, easing guidelines to stay at home by Easter , we will fail to stop the epidemic and millions more will be infected. Even with active control, we might be facing around 81,000 deaths by July according to a new detailed analysis from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The transfer of the virus, which may have originated in bats , to humans was an unforeseen event. The response to that event has been determined by the policies of nations. On December 31, the Wuhan government publicly confirmed it was treating dozens of cases of a mysterious new pneumonia outbreak and on January 7 , officials identified a new coronavirus as the cause. The first confirmed case in Japan was identified in mid-January, with South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and the US following suit within days.

The East Asian countries went into action. Many had experienced the 2003 SARS outbreak and had public health teams on alert for new epidemics. More than two months later, the number of confirmed cases has skyrocketed in the US, with more than 250 cases per million people, far higher than China, which has approximately 57 cases per million; Hong Kong, 60; Taiwan, 11; Singapore, 117; Japan, 11; and Korea, 180.