1812年1月（比拿破仑同志统帅法兰西大军进攻沙皇俄国还要早五个月）创刊号发行《新英格兰医学期刊》至今，已经过去了208年之久，从未参与过美国政坛两党之争、据说世界范围医学领域最权威、江湖地位最高大上的一本杂志，昨日打破历史传统，编辑们撰写、以社论形式发文，高度赞美中共国战疫功绩同时，例数川普治下美国政府控制疫情的种种不是，一塌糊涂，全面失败，疾呼美国全体选民醒悟起来，同仇敌忾，抄起你大选选票的手中武器，把总统川普赶下台！

原标题本来并没有前面四个字，上谷歌搜索一看，Wow ! 

几乎全世界的英文媒体都是一呼百应 ...... 

Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.

The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering,1 the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.

We know that we could have done better. China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay. These measures were severe but effective, essentially eliminating transmission at the point where the outbreak began and reducing the death rate to a reported 3 per million, as compared with more than 500 per million in the United States. Countries that had far more exchange with China, such as Singapore and South Korea, began intensive testing early, along with aggressive contact tracing and appropriate isolation, and have had relatively small outbreaks. And New Zealand has used these same measures, together with its geographic advantages, to come close to eliminating the disease, something that has allowed that country to limit the time of closure and to largely reopen society to a prepandemic level. In general, not only have many democracies done better than the United States, but they have also outperformed us by orders of magnitude.