40% of death due to COVID-19 in US could have staved off, news reports state.

The new released Lancet Commission report says about 40% of the nation’s coronavirus deaths could have been prevented if the United States’ average death rate matched other industrialized nations.

Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era faulted former President Donald Trump’s “inept and insufficient” response to COVID-19,its report said roots of the nation’s poor health outcomes are much deeper.

The professors at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and longtime advocates for a single-payer health system such as “Medicare for All”and commission co-chairs Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein said the report, published Thursday, underscores decades of health ,economic and social policies that have accelerated the nation’s disparities.

“The overriding thing that we need to do in our country is to decrease the huge and widening inequalities that have emerged in our nation,” Himmelstein said.

Public health measures such as mask wearing and physical distancing could have saved lives, Woolhandler said, but Trump failed to create a national response, instead leaving crucial decisions to states.

His actions “caused a lot of citizens to fail to take it seriously and interfered with the kind of coordinated response they have been able to use in a lot of countries that are more successful than the U.S. in controlling the epidemic,”  Woolhandler said.