[underyx]

At the same time, New York, with a population of 19.5M, has nearly half as many cases as Italy, which has a population of 60.5M.

But then we can drill further and compare Lombardy, which has a similar population to NYC's. They have 35k and 22k cases, respectively.

I think the only thing we learned here is that snap-judgement narratives are fairly useless here. Just look at the raw data if you want to have an opinion, it's quite accessible.

[2019-nCoV]

Compare the CFR of Lombardy and NYC.

[underyx]

You can easily do that yourself! I recommend https://covid19info.live/ for playing around with the data in most cases. For regional data though, I'd probably check the Wikipedia articles on the respective countries.

[2019-nCoV]

What I meant was that the more enlightening figure to compare is CFR.

NY — 1.03%

Lombardy — 13.9%

[underyx]

Each figure tells you something new. No datapoint "trumps" another by being more interesting. These two numbers do add useful context though, so thanks for that.

[2019-nCoV]

Interesting may not be the right word. Though CFRs that are an order of magnitude apart suggests the discrepancy between actual and confirmed cases in many regions of the world is much greater than that in the US.

[grecy]

I read it a different way.

We know deaths lag behind infections by a week or two. [1] and we know the US was a couple of weeks behind Italy and Spain in their infections blowing up.

So we'll have to wait until a couple of weeks after peak infections before we can see the true mortality rate in any given region/country.

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/9350/1*r-ddYhoUtP_se6x-NOEinA.pn...