Australian deaths per million = 3.92
US deaths per million = 228.5
And the US number is likely to go to 500 in the next two months whilst in some Australia states it looks like COVID-19 is fully eradicated.
b) Number of international travellers is irrelevant given that the policy in Australia was to quarantine ALL visitors for 14 days. Same policy that the UK has now adopted and you can’t argue that they don’t have a lot of international travellers. Again it is simply bad policy.
c) Climate is not that different to many parts of the US right now. It’s not like it’s winter versus summer. Fairly mild temperatures in both countries right now.
Autrstial probably didn't have community spread of covid until Late Feb. But America had community spread in at least mid Jan--and probably earlier. But Australia locked down essentially when America did. If they can eradicate the disease, that's a huge win, but if they can't they are just delaying what happened in America.
Or is your point just that America is Special and can't be compared to anyone?
The key point here is transmission of an infectious disease, so to get a proper comparison, you need to start with approximately the same probabilities of people infecting one another. That begins with proximity. Comparing the U.S. and Australia doesn't work because of that.
Am I here on HN or in r/worldnews?
2) Australia and US have quite similar temperatures right now given that it’s often moderate in Autumn/Spring.
[0] Google Scholar search of “COVID-19 humidity”
UK deaths per million = 488
US 260 deaths per million
UK 499
France 404
Netherlands 322
Germany (Kudos!) 94.8
The US is not doing badly at all.
This is who we should be comparing ourselves too, not just choosing some random countries that are doing worse than us.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
Which means the US is on track to at minimum 500+ within the next few months making it the worst country in the world.
Because a large number of those cases are NYC, which is already on the downside of its curve by a considerable degree, while the US as a whole is still trending upward, meaning that the country outside of NYC is doing pretty poorly.
Sadly people can’t look past the big absolute number of deaths and attach proper context to it. Like deaths per million, or ignoring that ~half of cases and deaths are restricted to a single metropolitan area.