Item — HN Reader

>the US is worst hit entirely

How is it that people still claim this with a straight face? The US has the most number of deaths on an absolute basis, but by per capita Belgium, the UK, France, Spain, and Italy are much worse off. (The US has more people than those countries combined.) Of the large western European countries only Germany did significantly better on deaths on a per-capita basis.

There is a real discussion to be had regarding how Western countries in general did versus the likes of China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, but that's not the same thing.

4 comments

Give it a few weeks. Everyone's given up on the whole lockdown/social distancing thing, and people are going out with abandon. Cases are spiking to record levels. [1]

The US is kind of the worst of all words right now: shut down the economy for 6 whole months, savage businesses large and small -- then, as though everything's magically gone back to normal, just re-open, paying the human toll as well. All while bailing out Wall Street and trying to dig up PPE hair on fire style and preventing meat packers from suing their employers for maintaining an unsafe work environment.

It's kinda nutty just how much of an abject failure the US response has been.

[1] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=Canada&location=US

But you are not considering the fact that the number of cases have been on a decline in these countries, but the US is already experiencing the second wave without ever even bringing the first wave under control.

I think there’s a strong argument that that isn’t a separate wave at all. The first wave is ending in NY and NJ, but it’s still on the upswing in many other states. Add those together and it looks a bit like two waves, but that’s not a helpful way to think about it.

Regardless of the semantics, my point is the "infections per capita" will keep increasing for US but for these European countries it's pretty much at a standstill for now.

But US is also a non uniform country, so IMO best statistics should be done on clusters, even small countries have different regions with different stats, a good comparison would also be on the larger cities and see how the percentages compare, if they differ a lot analyze what could cause the difference and if you figureout the reason apply it to reduce deaths.

The trouble is, the US is still in an earlier phase. Compare the shape of the curve in the US (sharp rise, flatline, sharp rise) to the standard rise-fall shape seen in most European countries.