While US federal and state government responses have been incompetent, there are other critical factors such as population density and cultural behaviors. So blaming everything on the government is a "god of the gaps" logical fallacy. And over time I expect death rates to roughly even out over the full span of the pandemic; unless a country can completely eradicate the virus and close their borders, public health measures only delay the deaths rather than preventing. Flattening the curve will only slightly decrease the total area under the curve.

As people have been reporting - the hospitals have a huge monetary incentive to code a death as COVID19. If someone comes in and dies, the hospital can run a PCR test, get a false positive then get 10's of thousands for the COVID19 death from the government.

My best friend's dad is currently a Doctor and is fighting his hospital after he transferred two patients to a different hospital to try and save their life. One of the patient died, depriving his hospital of the death funds from the government, which the other hospital got.

Even the fact checkers are admitting that the [entire incentive structure is to count as many people with covid19 as possible](https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-...), but then say "there's no evidence" that there is fraud. A laughable proposition. When there is a bag of money for doing corrupt thing X, corrupt thing X always get's done throughout history.

These deaths are therefore the result of mostly fraud and when the real numbers are considered (probably something closer to 15-25% of what's being reported) then this disease is something that lags behind many other diseases currently circulating in the population that the media just ignores.

  >The number of people in the US who have died due to government incompetence...

We're seeing a massive uptick in cases in the UK at the moment, just a couple of weeks after the government encouraged people to go back to work and re-opened the schools and universities.

I live in a university city in UK. Since March we've been told at various times; to work from home if we possibly can, not to leave the area, to only leave the area to visit one other family, to go back to work if we can, to wear masks in indoor spaces, not to mix in groups of more than 12, not to mix in groups of more than 6... etc. etc. No-one seems to know what the regulations actually are from one week to the next... least of all those in charge.

Then, in the past couple of weeks, the new university year has come around and our city has had its annual influx of 100000+ students from all over the UK.

It's so insane it would be laughable, if it weren't putting lives at risk. You've got the city's inhabits being told to minimise contact with other people and not leave their local area unless absolutely necessary and then, after 6 months of following these guidelines we are suddenly inundated with 100000+ outsiders, from all over the country. And this is happening in university cities up and down the land.

If I'd been asked to come up with a scheme to deliberately spread the virus as widely as possible, I'd have been hard pushed to come up with a better one.

I don't know what the situation is elsewhere but in the UK there's also an obnoxious 'spin doctoring' effort ongoing on to try and take the blame for the failure to control the outbreak away from government and onto the people.

The fact that the UK government were one of the last in Europe to introduce a lockdown; the fact that they've done nothing but chop and change the rules & guidelines ever since, so that no-one actually knows what they are; the fact that the government ordered hundreds of thousands of people back to work, schools and universities while the pandemic was still not properly under control are all brushed under the carpet.

Instead, every government announcement on Covid emphasises that tougher measures will be needed if "people don't follow the guidelines". A nice bit of deflection, to blame the victims of their own incompetence for the failure to keep the pandemic under control.

We're lowering the curve. If we let the infection spread unabated, most hospital systems will swiftly be overrun. Just as in Italy when the outbreak first occurred, we would have people dying in the streets due to lack of care, leading to complete and total collapse of trust in the healthcare and governmental systems.

The lockdowns are absolutely necessary to avoid panic and potential societal breakdown. It's hard to imagine because it's not the path we've taken.

The lockdowns happened specifically because at the time, the two places with widespread spread of the virus(China, Italy) had overrun hospitals. The lockdown was implemented to pause the system and determine just exactly how bad this was and come up with a response.

...over 200,000.

> Total predicted number of excess deaths since 2/1/2020 across the United States: 201,917 - 262,877

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Statistically, COVID has caused roughly a quarter million more people to die than we expected to die of other causes.

That said, your point about the age of the deceased is a good one. There was something particularly tragic about the death of a young, drafted soldier. That doesn't take away from the vast numbers of parents and grandparents who have died in the United States from this pandemic, though.