I was hoping for a quiet Sunday when Rich Lowry, fresh from a Biden attack, turns his mind to of all places Australia. "Australia goes insane!" blasts the headline. I sent the article to my daughter who lives in Melbourne and lectures at the university. She is slow to judgement and her first response was, "Where's he coming from? He never mentions any numbers." I try to explain that right wing commentators and leaders, like our Republican Governor, don't cope well with the numbers of dead from COVID. Their rallying cry is, "Give me liberty or give me death." The US is doing very well on that front, lots of liberty and lots of death. Proportionately for every one Australian death from COVID, forty-six Americans die. The US wins that particular race. Because those deaths occur privately in hospitals, the general public seems to ignore the news. Doctors and nurses keep reminding everyone but their warnings fall on deaf ears. "He ought also look at hospitalization costs and the cost to the economy of treating so many sick people," she chirped in. "Our lockdowns are area and time specific to isolate infections. Families do suffer. But a majority of Australians agree with the strict rules because they save lives. There has been resistance but it's been confined to more working class areas of Australia. Understanding how a pandemic works might be difficult for some Americans. It's a shame that it's been politicized when the main object should be saving lives."

In this pandemic Australia's public health care policies are different to those of the US and to an outsider like Lowry may seem draconian and undemocratic but surely, when the battle is over and we have retuned to some sort of normality, saving lives should be the ultimate goal. Using a pandemic to advance one's own political agenda seems callous when the dead are just ignored as some sort of acceptable statistic. We have rightfully made much of the deaths of citizens from the tragedy of 9/11. Should we not also lament the loss of nearly 20,000 of our fellow citizens here in Arizona from COVID?