Tehran 22 April _Since nearly three and a half months now, the United States, like many other countries in the world, has been affected by coronavirus. The first case of 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in the United States was reported in Washington State on January 21, about three weeks before President Trump presented the fiscal 2021 budget to the congress, calling for cuts to social safety net programs.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club(YJC)_By comparing coronavirus cases and deaths in the US (As of April 20, the US has more than 760,000 confirmed cases and 40,565 deaths) and other countries in the world, one could see that nearly one third of the COVID-19 confirmed cases and one-fifth of the dead are US citizens. This is while the US president had initially downplayed coronavirus, attempting to keep public panic at bay.
The US has now more confirmed coronavirus cases than anywhere else in the world, while the number of cases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the two countries where the United States has had a military presence since 2001 under pretext of the War on Terror, are respectively 1539 and 996 people (As of April 20).
Although the United States is much stronger in terms of wealth and infrastructure than Iraq and Afghanistan, e.g., the US budget for the Fiscal Year 2021 is 35 times more than Iraq’s, but, regrettably, it has been much weaker than those countries in responding to the pandemic and its situation is much more worrying.
According to Dr. Brian Monahan, the attending physician of US Congress and the US Supreme Court, 70 million to 150 million people in the US will become infected with COVID-19. That estimate, which is in line with other projections from health experts, underscores the potential seriousness of this outbreak because it has become clear that the US infrastructure is not ready to face such a threat to the health of its citizens.
The tragedy is that the Health and Human Services’ share of the Trump's proposed budget for FY 2021 is estimated at 96 billion dollars, which includes a nearly ten percent cut, almost 100 million dollars.
On the other hand, estimated US military spending for the same period of time is $934 billion, about 10 times of Health and Human Services’. This figure is more than the $705 billion outlined by the Department of Defense alone.
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