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Comment by gwright | Hacker News Reader

> The US covid response is a distinct, notable, and quite frankly disastrous outlier in the industrial world. No one handled this as badly as we did, objectively.

I don't think that assertion holds up. Our economy didn't contract as much as others, our per/capital death rate isn't the worst, we blocked international travel sooner, etc.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/393903/

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

The US is probably one of the most globally interconnected countries also, which epidemiologically speaking is probably a worst case scenario. This is my speculation though, not sure I've seen any reliable information in this regard.

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This thing is not over, and the US per capita death rate is not good. In fact it is one of the worst, and you cannot ignore the fact that we still have a huge number of active cases whereas much of the rest of the industrialized world has reduced their case numbers significantly to manageable levels that allow contact tracing and fast turnarounds on testing. The US is still adding to our death rate and case numbers aggressively. Other countries are not. This is what makes the U.S. a disasterous outlier.

And don't ignore the long term impacts either. Just because you the U.S. has a low mortaility rate does not mean the disease will not have long term effects. People may die sooner, or suffer significant health effects later on that leave a lasting mark on the economy.

You suggestion that this is because the US is so interconnected is a foolish one. Europe is quite interconnected, has had similarly bad initial outbreaks, but has subsequently been able to address those outbreaks much better than the U.S.. What would you say about the politicization of preventative measures that we know work - wearing masks and social distancing?

> a huge number of active cases whereas much of the rest of the industrialized world has reduced their case numbers significantly to manageable levels that allow contact tracing and fast turnarounds on testing. The US is still adding to our death rate and case numbers aggressively. Other countries are not. This is what makes the U.S. a disasterous outlier.

It isn't an outlier by any statistical definition that makes sense to me and you are glossing over the way aggressive testing changes the "case numbers" and also aren't being clear if you are talking about "case numbers" or "cases per 1000 tests" or "cases per capita". These details matter in order to have a coherent discussion about the numbers.

> our per/capital death rate isn't the worst

It's close to the worst, though. We're sixth among industrial nations. And moreover that's down to luck: we had a terrible initial outbreak in New York, just as other cities like Milan, Madrid and Brussels did. And if you look at those metro areas, in fact NY is the worst. But we're a big country so the initial deaths were lower as a fraction.

But then what happened? We went to sleep as a huge second wave crested, and everyone else got it under control. So while it's true that we're still behind other nations in deaths, we're catching up rapidly, while their outbreaks are nearly flat (though starting to trend up a bit in many places -- they should watch that).

Give us a month at the current death rate and we'll have passed everyone but Belgium.

Have you been watching India's numbers?

I was responding to this statement:

> No one handled this as badly as we did, objectively.

Now if you want to change the goalposts and talk about "close to worst", fine, but let's agree you are changing the goalposts. And of course everyone ignores the fact that we have no idea what the real numbers were in China.

> Give us a month at the current death rate and we'll have passed everyone but Belgium.

What does this even mean? It can only mean that you are trying to count total deaths, I think, which is a meaningless statistic unless you scale it to the population size.

Within the US, the numbers are terribly skewed due to deaths in nursing homes and assisted living facilities in and around NYC. If you consider our national numbers when those outliers are removed things look vastly different. But if you do that you would have to start being a bit critical of some decisions made by people with (D) after their name on TV and of course we all know that is to be avoided at all costs. Much easier to pretend that President Trump failed in some way.

> if you want to change the goalposts and talk about "close to worst", fine

I didn't say deaths though, I said "handled", so if there's any goalpost motion it seems to be on your part. Some cities just had bad initial outbreaks. Madrid didn't make better policy decisions than Berlin in February/March, they were just unlucky.

But in April/May, we knew how this virus worked, mostly. And, mostly, nations around the industrialized world made policy decisions designed to contain it. And it worked.

With one very notable exception. I'll say it again, and stand by it: No one handled this as badly as we did, objectively.

> It can only mean that you are trying to count total deaths, I think, which is a meaningless statistic unless you scale it to the population size.

Clearly I was talking per capita and extrapolating the current curve out. Here, check for yourself: https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

See how the total deaths per capita are quite flat now across all industrialized nations? See also how the USA is... not?

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