A table
I’ve been meaning for days to find a source for per capita stats as well as totals, and a certain annoying drive-by commenter gave me the prod to do it. Here’s one that gives deaths per 1 million people as of now:
Spain 440
Italy 391
France 302
Germany 55
UK 237
US 122
On the other hand it gives China 3, which doesn’t seem very plausible.
Anyway…per capita we seem on the low side, which is worth knowing but not something to give Trump credit for.
I read somewhere the other day that Sweden went for the “herd immunity” approach and that’s why its numbers are twice Norway’s.
One of our state senators is promoting the herd immunity approach; the letter page of our newspaper yesterday was alive with all sorts of people calling him all kinds of idiot. I’m glad there are some who have sense.
Here is a good visualization tool for multiple countries.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/covid-19-curves-compare-canada-and-other-key-nations-1.4881500?fbclid=IwAR0j-UVVFklugOAqNLd-ryKpvw7-EWe3Z0Fy84MjhKjKe_hpIUhJFB8rf3k
China`s numbers are low because it had a very bad problem in one area, and more or less prevented it from breaking out elsewhere.
US per capita is low for similar reasons, but comparing to the European outbreak is perilous, only the UK and NY are at roughly the same stage. Right now the UK looks good compared to Italy and Spain because a lot of British people haven`t finished dying yet.
The US is also repeating the British error of failing to learn from the Italian example, failing to learn from what happened in NY. US cases have grown at increasing rate for five straight days, multiple states have that telltale upward tick in the rate that shows the near vertical stage of exponential growth is imminent….just in time for the demonstrations to end stay-at-home.
I cam to make Naif’s point, but since they’ve already done that, I’ll point out instead that there is ample evidence (and in some quarters acknowledgement) that the US is undercounting deaths in retirement homes, amongst the homeless and especially just deaths at home. NYC acknowledged they simply stopped counting those because they were not testing bodies, yet the home death rate went from around 25 per day to 250 per day. Do the maths on that one.
So far NZ has had 12 fatalities. One at home, 10 in hospital of which I think 9 were associated with rest home clusters (7 from a dementia care facility in my city), which just shows how awful the disease is when it hits such places.
We have been very fortunate in that NZ was well set up to observe what was happening overseas and we have an early defended border for quarantine purposes. More to the point we have had political leaders that were united in their decision to rely on scientific and medical advice and the clarity and effectiveness of communication has been nothing short of brilliant. We’ve also done something like 85K tests (17k per million of population). Considering our health systems and government have nothing like the resources and wealth of the US or many other western nations — and that we were on an Italy-like trajectory — that decision making and communication from our politicians is what has made the difference between a health disaster and economic disruption.
That said, we have had at least two deaths resulting from non-covid harm that can be attributed to the pandemic. One was an elderly man who was physically well but suffered severe anxiety as a result of the lockdown and the inability to see friends and loved ones. I understand the anti-anxiety drugs killed him. The other was a young man who disappeared the day the Lockdown was announced. Again prone to depression and anxiety.
All tragic. Where do you begin and end counting victims. In Japan hospitals are turning away people suffering from strokes and heart attacks because they are overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases.
You’re welcome! ;-)
[…] a comment by Rob on A […]
Any tool or graph that doesn’t adjust for population size is complete garbage.
China’s numbers are low because:
1. They’re massively underreporting their numbers.
2. They used extreme oppressive measures to suppress the spread.
I personally think about 30% of #1 and 70% of #2, but come to your own conclusions.
Apparently my comments now are “awaiting moderation”.
Come on, Ophelia. Do you want a hive mind? Do youn want your commenters to be a bunch of yes-men, yes-women, and yes-enbies?
China’s count is almost certainly too low, but it’s almost certainly not too low by a factor of more than, say, ten (and likely not by more than a factor of two or three — otherwise we would have plenty of evidence of fresh mass graves and the like). Still, taking China’s number at face value, 3-per-million translates to 4,179 deaths, give or take a few depending on the rounding error. China has *a lot* of people in it.
I’ve been spending a probably unhealthy amount of time daily checking and diving into the latest virus statistics at the worldometers.info site. The table can be sorted by any column, so I will sort it by deaths, or deaths per million, and see where various countries rank. You can look at data from each country, including graphs of the daily cases or daily deaths, so I look to see which countries are stabilizing the death rate and which ones continue to show exponential growth. I am of late watching other countries overtake China, watching India rise in the rankings, checking the US by-state table changes, and watching the US climb the per capita rankings.
I am told by people who had searched for sites with country rankings that this site is updated faster than most, showing new figures several hours ahead of some other popular sites. I can’t vouch for that, but it does get many updates daily.
The site is primarily one that tracks population, so there are a ton of pages with population charts and graphs, with lots of sortable tables. They could be fun to explore, but I am nonetheless drawn to the virus data.
And this is a more crucial indicator of how we are doing than per capita numbers alone. If we were doing great, our per capita numbers would not be climbing. They would stabilize, or drop off.
Statistics. How do they work? (Trump knows statistics other people don’t know, but they are unfortunately only promulgated by fairy dust, and since fairies don’t exist…)
I’m not sure what you are referring to. The per capita numbers (total deaths per population) can’t drop off, they can only climb. The daily death counts can drop off, but they are not doing so in the US, although it seems to be rising less quickly than before; is that what you meant? If so, I agree, and those are some of the most interesting comparisons.
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones is tracking a six day rolling average of daily death counts for several Western countries. Some are showing a decline, some are stalled, and some, including the US, continue to rise.
Skeletor – I told you I was putting you in moderation, and why, in reply to your fly-by comment on another post. I also told you that I had to do it there because you use mailinator instead of a real email address so I can’t email you to explain. It’s not about having a hive mind, it’s about your pattern of dropping in to say THAT’S WRONG about something and then not responding to replies, and then doing the same thing a week or month later. It’s distracting and annoying, and since you almost never engage, it’s pointless.
Sackbut, the per capita could level…when I said drop off, I shortcutted in such a way that I did not make my appropriate point…the rate of increase could drop off. I apologize for any laziness or failure to pay attention that made my comment confusing, and welcome the opportunity to clarify.