Starting today, citizens of 14 nations are allowed to travel to the EU. The designated countries are Canada, Tunisia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Georgia, Algeria, Australia, Montenegro, Morocco, Rwanda, Serbia, Uruguay, and Thailand
Absent, obviously, is the United States.
It's a sign of how much more cohesive much of the world's response to the coronavirus has been when compared to the US. As the world begins to return to normal, America is seeing COVID cases skyrocket. The US has around 4% of the world's population, yet a quarter of its cases.
We tried to contain this virus too late and re-open too early. Nearly all progress we made in flattening the curve has been erased. We failed.
And we should be angry, because much of this could have been avoided.
The US bungled early testing. States fought over ventilators, with the president insinuating that leaders in blue states needed to "treat him well" if they wanted medical supplies for their residents.
When the first cases broke out, the risk was downplayed. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (along with three other senators, a Democrat and two Republicans) and her husband sold off $1.2 million in stock, even as she defended the Trump administration's slow response to the virus.
Instead of a much-needed cohesive response by the federal government, we got a patchwork of policies that ranged from total lockdown to little at all (like South Dakota, where the governor refused requests from local officials to issue a stay-at-home order and invited those frustrated with lockdowns to come to South Dakota).
Nearly as soon as lockdowns started, officials gave up, arguing that they should reopen to save the economy, even if that meant the deaths of Americans.
And then we reopened too early, many officials assuring us the worst had passed, just to erase the progress of the past three months.
We were failed by politicians who valued their reputations and re-election chances over the safety of the people. From the beginning, the risk we faced was downplayed. Our leaders didn't want to seem overly cautious or acknowledge that something might happen that differed from their narrative of making the country "great again."
And then they gave in to pressure again, this time reopening when they knew it was still dangerous. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote off concerns of a rise in cases in the state to increased testing and only acknowledged that the virus was spreading faster after it became unavoidable for him to do so.
At every step, the measures the US took to combat the virus were too little, too late. The American people were failed. And now nearly 130,000 are dead. Not all of those deaths could have been avoided - COVID-19 was going to hit regardless of our policies. But the effects could have been mitigated, had we listened to health experts back when this all started.
It didn't have to be this bad. And now the rest of the world is going back to normal, decidedly without us.