[ars]

Even better would be for News to stop competing for clicks by finding the most inflammatory, worst possible things, and reporting only on them.

If you listened to the media the US has the worst virus response in the world. Obviously that's not true: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

But you would not know it by reading the news.

[matthewmacleod]

Realistically, the US should not be debating whether its response was the worst in the world, or merely e.g. the 10th worst in the world. Both are shocking outcomes for such a highly-developed economy.

The US has, for the most part, extensive resources with which a global pandemic can be managed. It has money, people, manufacturing capability, research centres, and medical facilities. But the country has catastrophically mismanaged this challenge, and this is almost entirely for political reasons. Over 100k people are dead – it's a bad outcome, and we should be looking at why that bad outcome happened and what can be done to fix it.

I live in the UK – another country which has also badly mismanaged this pandemic. The reasons are a little bit different, but it does seem pretty startlingly obvious to be that the underlying problem is the same – you cannot solve a real-world problem by pretending it does not exist. The UK failed its response because it spent too much time on political management and lying to itself, and not enough time on dealing with problems and being honest about them. The same applies to the US, and it's honestly absolutely breathtaking the number of perspectives I have seen that want to apologise for this.

[danhak]

The U.S. currently ranks #12 out of 200 in terms of infections per capita, far higher than any western democracy--even those that have done significantly more testing per capita. Yes, it is pretty close to the worst response in the world: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

[perl4ever]

Countries with more deaths per capita than the US, in order:

Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, Sweden, France

At the rate we're going, that may change eventually, but when you compare the general discussion of, say, the US vs. Sweden, it's obvious there is an absurd amount of bias, both from the US domestic media and others.

[vertex-four]

Most folks I know think Sweden totally messed up for political reasons, same as the US (but for different political reasons).

[perl4ever]

I think people are too judgmental. My point is just that people are biased about the facts, not that I accept the underlying belief that a lower death rate means virtue or intelligence.

[ars]

Infection numbers are too easy to fake. Look at mortality rate, that's what actually counts.