Idiot America is winning. We have more coronavirus infections per million residents than every other country.

"Germany reported 35 new cases per million residents over the past week; the U.S. had almost 1,100."

The problem with America is the stupidity. Morons don't wear masks and they do everything else wrong.

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New York Times

Should schools reopen?

An Iowa school district suspended its in-person summer school program this week after an outbreak of fevers. Fort Benning, an Army base in Georgia, had a coronavirus outbreak shortly after new recruits arrived. And multiple sports teams have had to halt practices after athletes or other employees got sick.

All of these recent cases make clear that reopening is not simply a matter of declaring it to be so.

Opening safely during a pandemic, and being able to stay open, requires planning carefully — and usually spending significant amounts of money, to pay for testing, cleaning and new social-distancing procedures.

Across the political spectrum, there have been calls for the reopening of U.S. schools this fall. And understandably so: Remote learning went very badly in the spring. An autumn without in-person school would leave students further behind and leave many parents without child care again.

The good news is that the experience in other countries suggests that it may be possible to reopen schools. Germany, Denmark and others have done so without causing big new virus outbreaks, as President Trump noted yesterday.

But those other countries have taken two steps that the U.S. has not.

One, they have first reduced the overall rate of new infections to low levels: Germany reported 35 new cases per million residents over the past week; the U.S. had almost 1,100. (The Times updates this map every day, tracking the virus around the world.)

Two, some of those other countries have allocated new money for schools, as I heard after surveying some of my Times colleagues around the world.

Hong Kong is covering the cleaning costs for its schools, Bella Huang told me. South Korea is helping schools open day care centers from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or longer, Su-Hyun Lee, who’s based in Seoul, said. Germany is subsidizing laptop purchases for low-income students, to help them combine remote and in-person learning, according to Christopher Schuetze in Berlin. And Italy has sent money to schools to pay for more teachers, student desks, masks and other equipment, Elisabetta Povoledo, a reporter in Rome, told me.

The U.S., by contrast, is suffering through by far the worst coronavirus outbreak of any affluent country, and the federal government has done little to help schools reopen.

Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, told me that reopening U.S. schools was feasible — but would require huge amounts of additional testing, as well as mask wearing, social distancing and keeping windows open.