What's the explanation here?
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...
You would think that the contrary would be true. If your health system is overloaded, it being socialized cannot make it better at first glance. Access isn't the issue, availability is (and this is what is seen in Canada right now).
Although I agree collectivist cultures probably have the upper-hand (e.g. China was able to enforce pretty stringent measures and pool resources to build hospitals).
How's the population dealing with these random arbitrary checkpoints and curfews? Are those popular measures?
Also, these policies are much worse for the working class that we don't seem to care about, which are either immigrants or people outside of Toronto or Montreal, so don't count for politicians. It's just really another conversation piece for the zoom crowd.
Also, we stopped giving out second doses to prioritize first doses. So that stat will definitely look horrible. But... we're still very low on first doses, only about 33%. :(
Incentives matter?
Canada has had 3x fewer deaths per capita, so I would still say they are a success case compared to us.
1. The US population is on average over 30lb overweight compared to the rest of the world with significant comorbidities (In the United States, 36.5 percent of adults are obese. Another 32.5 percent of American adults are overweight. In all, more than two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or obese),
2. has very old population similar to Italy (though this is similar to Canada too)
3. has tons of tourism during winter
4. Canada has a population density of 4 people per square kilometer and population of 1/10th of US. This density is even bigger factor for COVID and crazy dense cities. US has a population density 36 per Km2. US also has the third-highest population in the world.
5. New York was been found to be the origin of virus variant for majority of the US states - something Governor Cuomo played a big role in. Plus back in March, the American Health Care Association told Cuomo, Wolf, Murphy, Whitmer etc to stop ordering infected patients into nursing homes. The governors ignored the AHCA and removed their own family from nursing homes while forcing others:
https://www.ahcancal.org/News/news_releases/Pages/Long-term-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1191811
US numbers could have been better if it didn't have such major obesity problems.
Not far off from Canadian numbers, you can look it up. Canada is at pretty much exactly 2/3 overweight + obese. Certainly not 3x as high.
> 2. has very old population similar to Italy (though this is similar to Canada too)
As you noted, also similar to Canada.
> 3. has tons of tourism during winter
Is winter tourism worth an additional 400k deaths when you scale out the per capita difference?
> 4. Canada has a population density of 4 people per square kilometer
This is just a bad argument, for the obvious reason that dividing the Canadian population by the entire area of their landmass tell you nothing about the density of their cities or how many people live there. China has first-highest population in the world, way fewer people died there.
SF is one of the densest cities in the US and it had a low covid death rate.
> 5. New York was been found to be the origin of virus variant for majority of the US states - something Governor Cuomo played a big role in
The NY variant doesn't spread more easily, unlike other variants. Granted, Cuomo is an idiot (I've been an early adopter on that line of thought, he basically got famous early in the pandemic for how much of a failure his state was but people didn't realize it), but I don't think you can pin the entire discrepancy on Cuomo.
It's hilarious to look back in retrospect at how inflated Cuomo and DeBlasio's egos got in the early days of the crisis when NYC was one of the world's epicenters. They clearly both believed that appearing on national television in their "daily briefings" would lead them to greater things, perhaps the White House. (Same happened with Newsom in California.) Welp.
Meanwhile, NY goes up in flames and suddenly Cuomo is on TV every day and his approval rating was skyrocketing.
Because he was for several months the most prominent exponent of Orange Man Bad. *He even won an Emmy!* https://www.ocregister.com/2021/02/17/an-emmy-for-cuomo-migh...
Among men, the prevalence of obesity was over 8 percentage points lower in Canada than in the United States (24.3% compared with 32.6%) and among women, more than 12 percentage points lower (23.9% compared with 36.2%):
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db56.htm
12 and 8 percentages are fairly higher in comparison - especially when we are talking about percentages. USA which has 9-10x the population of Canada, 12% makes a very big difference.
3. You are severely underestimating the tourism. Yes, tourism in USA in winter is very high. Canada tourism in winter is significantly lower due to extreme cold weather. Almost all the trips for cruise ships, water parks (Disney), famous cities, national parks etc happen in USA. The snow season in Canada prevents all those.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200221/dq200...
> The number of tourists from overseas countries (countries other than the United States) rose to 7.1 million arrivals (+454,000) in 2019, while the number of US tourists to Canada rose to 15.0 million (+554,000). The summer months—June through September—were the peak months for tourism arrivals from overseas to Canada, representing 51.9% of all arrivals from overseas during 2019. By comparison, the peak months for tourism arrivals from the United States were May to October, with 68.8% of all US tourist arrivals to Canada.
> Canadian residents returned from 4.8 million trips abroad in December, up 2.9% from the previous month. Of these 4.8 million trips, 3.8 million were to the United States, up 3.3% from November. Almost three-quarters of these trips to the United States were made by car. Same-day car trips across the border edged up 0.4% to 1.8 million in December, while the number of return trips from overnight car trips rose 9.4% to 966,000. The number of plane trips to the United States rose 1.5% since November to 877,000. This was 4.7% higher than in December of the previous year. In December, travel to overseas countries by Canadian residents rose 1.8% to 1.1 million trips—the highest level on record for the month of December.
Now lets look at the opposite for tourism to USA:
> In 2019, the number of international tourist arrivals to the U.S. stood at almost 80 million after being on the rise for over a decade. 47.88 of that came from Americas (Canada being the first followed by Mexico).
https://www.statista.com/topics/1987/travel-and-tourism-indu...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1012283/united-states-in...
> In 2019, there were approximately 20.72 million overseas visitors from Canada to the United States. The visitation figures from Canada peaked in 2013 when the U.S. received a total of 23.41 Canadian citizens across its borders. In 2019, Canada placed first in terms of the most visitors from one nation to the United States, followed closely by fellow U.S. neighbor, Mexico.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/214764/number-of-visitor...
A large number of Canadians in the Niagara region also cross the border for simple stuff like cheaper goods. Nobody does the opposite.
Also international travellers from Canada often fly through US but not vice versa. When I have to visit my home in South Asia, it's always cheaper for me to fly through US. This is not true for the opposite.
And even the ones who visit places in Canada like Toronto and Niagara Falls visit New York too. And a lot of tourists come from Canada who visit places in south like Florida. Anecdotal - I know 3 families here with whose retired members all spend their winters in Florida and another family which spends it in Austin Texas.
4. Like I said, you sliced my point in half and ignored the rest of my comment where I state "This density is even bigger factor for COVID and crazy dense cities." Look at the population density of the 10 highest dense municipalities in Canada (highest is 5,492.6 people per square kilometre in Vancouver, B.C.):
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/170208/t001a...
Now compare it to USA. Top 50 cities amongst them all are signifiantly higher than the Canadian numbers. New York City alone is 10,431.1 people per square kilometre, San Francisco is 6,658.9, Boston is 5,143.4):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
5. False. From NYTimes: "Travel From New York City Seeded Wave of U.S. Outbreaks: The coronavirus outbreak in New York City became the primary source of infections around the United States. That helped to fuel outbreaks in Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and as far away as the West Coast. The findings are drawn from geneticists’ tracking signature mutations of the virus, travel histories of infected people and models of the outbreak by infectious disease experts":
Countries like the US and UK have banned export of the vaccine, but also of the needed materials.