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Comment by jsyedidia | Hacker News Reader

One should of course normalize by population. The USA has a population of 327 million. Eight nations in Western Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany) which are the core of the EU, have a population of 303 million. The US has 82,612 cases today according to worldometers.info. Those eight nations in Western Europe have a total of 289,767 cases today, which is about 3.78 times the US rate on a per capita basis.

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At the same time, New York, with a population of 19.5M, has nearly half as many cases as Italy, which has a population of 60.5M.

But then we can drill further and compare Lombardy, which has a similar population to NYC's. They have 35k and 22k cases, respectively.

I think the only thing we learned here is that snap-judgement narratives are fairly useless here. Just look at the raw data if you want to have an opinion, it's quite accessible.

Compare the CFR of Lombardy and NYC.

You can easily do that yourself! I recommend https://covid19info.live/ for playing around with the data in most cases. For regional data though, I'd probably check the Wikipedia articles on the respective countries.

What I meant was that the more enlightening figure to compare is CFR.

NY — 1.03%

Lombardy — 13.9%

Each figure tells you something new. No datapoint "trumps" another by being more interesting. These two numbers do add useful context though, so thanks for that.

Interesting may not be the right word. Though CFRs that are an order of magnitude apart suggests the discrepancy between actual and confirmed cases in many regions of the world is much greater than that in the US.

I read it a different way.

We know deaths lag behind infections by a week or two. [1] and we know the US was a couple of weeks behind Italy and Spain in their infections blowing up.

So we'll have to wait until a couple of weeks after peak infections before we can see the true mortality rate in any given region/country.

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/9350/1*r-ddYhoUtP_se6x-NOEinA.pn...

The testing rate to date in Spain is about 2x that of the US per capita. In Italy it is closer to 4x. That, plus the complete failure of the US to suppress transmission rates throughout huge parts of the population, must be taken in to account.

Are you using the latest numbers? More tests are being done every day now in the US than had been done total about a week ago, and we're up to 520,000 tests.

https://twitter.com/COVID19Tracking/status/12432908485082603...

Yes, for about 3-4 days the US has had a test are that is not dramatically behind other developed nations.

> complete failure of the US to suppress transmission rates

Hmm. Our curves look exactly like Spain and Italy, and indeed almost every exposed country appears to be on the same curve (with differing lags).

A few countries seem to be doing significantly better, but it's far from clear why.

These curves are all lagging by weeks, and are influenced heavily by test rates and transmission rates. Our tests rates are low (until about 3 days ago) and our transmission rates are high (because many populous states have issues no shelter-at-home directives). You don't have to wait long to see more clearly, just about a week.

To clarify, I'm talking about the death curves--these seem to be the most credible statistics. Looking at those, most of the curves do not look significantly different. The exceptions are (perhaps) China, South Korea, and Japan.

China's credibility on mass death statistics is a bit shaky, and Japan has had a serious moral hazard given their 2020 Olympic hosting (and there has been a sudden blip in Tokyo in the last day or two).

Looking at the curves, though, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that that of the USA, however bad, is not obviously different than those of most countries currently undergoing the epidemic.

Perhaps some think the US should be significantly better than most countries. I'm not really a believer in exceptionalism myself.

The USA started later and seems to have quicker growth rate. There is still time to catch up.

> There is still time to catch up.

What do you base this statement on?

Just extrapolation of the trend from plot my friend has prepared: https://covid.matemaciek.com/ - I won't be surprised if the number of confirmed cases in the USA reaches 300k in a week and overtakes cumulative number in mentioned group of core European countries in two weeks.

This, so much this. Especially for mortality rates where the US is currently doing better than most large developed countries.

> Especially for mortality rates where the US is currently doing better than most large developed countries

That's to be expected, because deaths lag behind infections by a week or two. [1] and we know the US was a couple of weeks behind Italy and Spain in their infections blowing up.

We'll have to wait until a couple of weeks after peak infections before we can see the true mortality rate in any given region/country.

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/9350/1*r-ddYhoUtP_se6x-NOEinA.pn...

True, and for overall infection rates as well, but the headline talks about the current situation and is misleading.

For deaths, the USA has a total of 1,184, and the 8 countries of Western Europe have 15,437, or about 14 times higher on a per-capita basis.

Yes those are dominated by Spain and Italy, but even the UK has more than 2x deaths per-capital than the US.

And China has a population of 1.3 billion ... it is pretty clear what has worked better than the current shoddy approach.

China had a 6-4 months heads up, and their data is still questionable.

And the data from the US obviously aren't questionable. Yeah, sure ...

It is, but at least people are free to question it.

Well, this is only the beginning, it is gonna get really bad and quick. USA will have the highest number of infections normalized by the population and most likely the highest dead rate also. The reason is USA only started testing and only 21 states told people to stay home as of today.

How is Switzerland part of the core of the EU when they're not a member of the EU?

Minor correction: Switzerland is not a member of the EU

Do you also take testing per capita into account? The US seems to be far behind on that. Or the US has found a super effective approach that no other nation has found to this kind of test/positives ratio. Also these countries don't seem to be at the same point in time as the US, we know the US is a week or two behind some of them. Comparing them like is not really fair.

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