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Comment by ghthor | Hacker News Reader

If your not present in America and viewing things on the ground why don't you keep your opinion to yourself. I say this because whatever you've been told isn't true.

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What is it exactly that’s not true? I’ve read the OP a couple times, and having a hard time finding anything stated that’s conclusively false.

How about the fact that the US deaths per capita is lower than France, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, UK and plenty of other countries... I consider those to be developed nations so I’m not sure their point really holds.

Maybe that is because those countries were hit earlier than the US?

You act as if the time they were ‘hit’ isn’t a matter of policy in and of itself.

I thought you were making a point about death statistics, not about policy. Now I could be wrong, but I think that the timing and location of early hotspots is pretty much random. Later, once the epidemic is firmly established in the population, the law of large numbers kicks in and statistics become more meaningful and predictive.

Belgian here. 1) we counted _all_ possible cases (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...) and 2) Belgium's population density is really high, so of course the virus travels easily.

You cannot compare two countries without taking more things than two numbers into account.

I didn’t say cases I said deaths - both countries have adopted the same guidelines for counting deaths. I would also argue that it is outcomes that matter here - deaths. You can argue as to why Belgium policy failed worse than other countries (population density) but at the end of the day it is outcomes that matter.

Additionally, yes the US has some very sparsely populated areas but the thing is they don’t affect the numbers that much because they are just that - sparsely populated.

> I didn’t say cases I said deaths

The article I linked is literally titled "Why Belgium's death rate is so high", you didn't even took the time to just click on it before replying to me.

Here's another, more recent article, in case you'd want to know more, and how our "over" counting effectively hurts our international image: https://www.dw.com/en/belgiums-coronavirus-overcounting-cont...

I'm just tired with people taking Belgium as a "worse situation" example, while our lockdown had been quite successful in flattening the curve. A counterpoint though, we really badly handled the nursing homes, and most of our deaths come from there.

It's unlikely this is going to remain the case. The US had 3 straight days of ~1100 deaths. If that continues for 2 months (and doesn't get worse or better, more likely to get worse given the infection rates) the US will be far worse than Italy and France and gaining on the top 2 spots. If it increases as it should, it will be much, much sooner.

There is a lot of speculation in your comment - I thought we were talking facts here.

Your comment isn't helpful unless you're willing to point out what isn't true and can only be observed from within America?

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