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Comment by rumanator | Hacker News Reader

> The US has not been harder but than Italy or Spain, or even Sweden.

You should check the facts. In the past few weeks New York alone reported more covid infections and deaths than Spain's total from the start of their outbreak, and New York has around 25% the population of Spain.

New York also has between 2 to 3 times the number of active covid cases that Spain has, which indicates the death count will only get far worse than what it already is.

> American cities with similar population and density to Stockholm

You may try to cherry pick anything, but the facts are the facts.

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These are the facts: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=home.... The US has had a little over twice as may deaths as Spain, but has more than six times the population.

You’re the one who is cherry picking. 97.5% of America doesn’t live in NYC. What’s going on in NYC isn’t a proxy for the USA as a whole. If you want to talk about NYC, we can do that—we could compare to Barcelona or Madrid or something similar. NYC has suffered for some reasons very specific to it. (Due to its role as an international travel hub, it is estimated that up to 100 different people started chains of infection in NYC, versus less than 10 in California). But even including NYC, the USA as a whole hasn’t been as hard hit as Sweden, much less Spain.

And excluding NYC (where, again, 97.5% of Americans live), the USA has been even less hard hit. My state is about the size of Switzerland, and has had half as many deaths.

>You may try to cherry pick anything, but the facts are the facts.

I enjoy the irony of criticizing someone for cherry-picking, while using NY as a proxy for how the whole of the US is doing.

Perhaps you could've picked the state that is most directly comparable to Spain in population and land size, California: 1/10th as many people dead per million. (But that too would be cherry-picking)

Your ignoring population size and focusing on totals. We are talking about the USA overall. According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ as of now:

Country, Deaths / 1m pop, Cases / 1m pop

USA 171, 3,045

Spain 503, 4,907

Italy 446, 3,298

Sure if you cherry pick the worst city in the US and compare it to Italy or Spain then yes you can make it look like there are more cases in the US and be technically correct but overall the US is doing better then Italy and Spain.

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