Skolnik: How Much Better It Could Have Been A Day to Remember – with Sadness The US hit a tragic milestone today – 300,000 deaths due to COVID-19. This is about 75 percent of the number of American military personnel killed in World War II. Yet, it did not have to be this way. How did this happen in the US? The Chinese did fail to transparently provide in a timely manner all of the information they had about an emerging infectious disease. However, this cannot be an excuse for America’s failure to suppress the virus. A number of countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, S. Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam, for example, had the same information that we had at the exact same time. However, they still managed to mostly suppress the virus.