Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

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I know the American press has been pushing hard on the idea that the US is uniquely failing to deal with this and it's all Trump's fault because it's an election year and that's the most effective tool they have, but that doesn't make it true. In particular, things are heading in a really worrying direction throughout Europe right now, with countries that already saw overflowing hospitals and much bigger drops in GDP than the US the first time around experiencing rapid increases in cases again.

Spain is particularly alarming - they're now above the US in terms of new cases per capita over the last week, they suffered a much bigger decline in GDP and quite a lot of deaths the first time around, and it's doubtful if they can afford a second lockdown or there's the political will to carry one out - but countries throughout Europe seem to be heading in the same direction, just a little bit behind them. Not that you'd probably realise this from the US reporting. Countries are also much more limited in how respond to this economically due to the Eurozone, and the negotiations over loosening this have made US politics look frankly farsighted and empathathetic by comparison.

The fact that Europe is also struggling is a distraction from the fact that the U.S. is struggling deeply with the pandemic. It isn't particularly surprising given their previous economic struggles. But in the U.S., it isn't just the pandemic. The U.S. has been dealing with a president who was handed a strong and recovering economy and relatively sane policies on a platter but literally does nothing every day but Tweet and watch T.V., takes on a couple meetings at best, and lets a third generation Jewish immigrant who somehow hates immigrants and is a white supremacist write his policies for him.

This is false and a garbage perspective.

The US is objectively doing far worse than any other nation going by infection numbers and death tolls alone. I can’t imagine how a reasonable person can believe that this is anything but a disaster of epic proportions.

Second waves were always a possibility and they will almost certainly happen without a significant testing and tracing infrastructure. Just because EU has not been perfect doesn’t mean it’s comparable to the disaster we have in the US. 180k official deaths as of writing.

I was curious so I looked up some data: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality, sorting by the deaths/100k people, the US is below Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy and Sweden (in addition to some others). That data seems to support the situation in the US isn't exceptionally different than the situation in the EU.

Actually, the EU had about 130k deaths itself. If you add the UK to that, you get just as many as the US basically (172k vs 180k). So I don't think the EU really did much better than the US in this regard, overall. There are exceptions in specific countries, especially in some of the more Eastern countries, and Germany to some extent, but overall the EU countries did as badly as the US.

Not to mention that the EU itself did basically nothing to help with the pandemic crisis, especially in the first months - even arranging travel conditions was beyond them.

You need to look at per capita numbers.

Yes, and? thisisliff said what the per-capita numbers said; do you dispute them?

According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ per-1M total cases in US: 18k; in Spain (highest of EU large countries): 9k. About 2x difference not in US favor.

All-time total case numbers from EU countries aren't that meaningful because pretty much all the countries that experienced massive, hospital-overwhelming outbreaks also massively undertested during them compared to the US during its outbreak. I know that in particular Italy and the UK were more or less only testing people who were hospitalized for Covid during the bulk of it. It looks like Spain may have done a little better, which might explain why they reported so many cases compared to others.

Partly this is because of the timing of the outbreaks, and partly it's because the US ramped up testing to an extent that hasn't really been replicated elsewhere. So you'd likely run into similar issues comparing New York case numbers with anywhere else in the country due to their big outbreak being earlier, or with comparing the current surge in cases in Europe with the first one.

OK. You're looking at total cases; thisisliff is looking at mortality. So Spain had more people die, but the US had more people get it. So, 1) the US has a healthier population, 2) the US has a better healthcare system, 3) the US did a better job of detecting the disease among those with less severe cases.

1 or 2 support your position; 3 doesn't (because we don't have accurate data to tell whether it spread more in Spain). And we don't have enough data (that I have seen) to tell the difference between 1, 2, and 3.

So I don't know where we are. But you did in fact have data to support your position, and (since the question was the spread of the virus, not the mortality) you were citing the correct column in the reports.

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