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The Real Marty · 07-20-2020, 09:27 AM

https://medium.com/@indica/the-plague-st...b20678a80e

Americans now have access to exactly two dozen states, five more (*) if they want to endure a 14-day quarantine on the end. Americans have gone from world power to getting the side-eye from Ecuador in a matter of months. Right now Americans are only really welcome on remote islands or at corralled resorts in Mexico, where they can be isolated from everyone else.

It’s not that other nations don’t want to welcome Americans, they just can’t. The point of a passport is that a sovereign power vouches for its bearer, but America can’t vouch for the health of their citizens at all. America’s public health regime is far less trustworthy than Liberia’s (which is actually quite good). Its sovereign is mad.

At the same time, you can’t trust Americans. Americans have poor hygiene (low masking rate) and at least 40% of the population can’t be trusted to even believe that COVID-19 exists, let alone to take it seriously. They’re likely to refuse testing, not report symptoms, break quarantine, and generally NOT follow rules. Americans have a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance that makes them unwelcome travelers.

[font=medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria,]That’s the near future of the United States. An epidemic that spreads largely unchecked until next year. A population too unprotected and ignorant to be allowed anywhere else. A world that largely suppresses the virus — from Mongolia to Ghana to Trinidad & Tobago — but which has to keep America in isolation.[/font]

In the end, Trump did what he said. He built a wall around America and made the world pay for it. He just never told Americans that they’d be stuck inside.