Could it get any worse in the US?

WITH a deadly pandemic raging around the country that is responsible for some 160,000 American lives and which has wiped out five years of economic growth, the only person I know who would probably empathise with her countryfolk is a family relative who celebrated her 100-year birthday this Saturday.

She was born a year after the end of the Spanish flu that had cost the lives of 650,000 Americans and lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s that wrecked the American economy and during which many feared that the United States was on the eve of a violent political revolution.

All things considered, the United States has not reached the point when hundreds of the bodies of the pandemic victims are being gathered in the cities' parks and thousands of jobless Americans are roaming America's streets.