Before the weekend comes, the number of known deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. will surpass roughly 58,000. This is the same number of Americans who died during the Vietnam War. It took five presidents — Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford — and more than 20 years to amass that body count overseas.

Donald Trump needed just four months to knock on the door of that grim milestone right here at home, and then he mused on national television about whether injections of disinfectant into the human body could be used to treat COVID-19, immediately leading calls to poison control centers