This is not correct. If you adjust for population size, most of highly-developed Europe is doing much worse than the USA right now. That includes Germany, Switzerland, etc.
The US has had 34k cases and 760 deaths per million people. Germany has had 10k cases and 152 deaths per million people. So Germany has done 3 to 5 times better than the US so far. The only Western European country that has clearly worse numbers than the US is Belgium and in part that may be because they have a much broader definition of deaths with COVID19.
But it does show that you cherry-picked data that didn't give the full story. The follow up comment only made things more clear, which I think you should appreciate.
I didn't cherry pick, I was in fact exhaustive. I was looking for cases that supported "most of highly-developed Europe is doing much worse than the USA" and specifically mentioned Germany. I looked at the specific cases mentioned and any others that could be classified as "much worse".
I agree, I just wanted to make it extra clear for others how several large European countries seem to have numbers similar to the US (Ironically... I could have phrased it in a way that made that more clear to you.)
It seems to me that all remaining levels and sub-sectors of American society have responded reasonably competently, despite the grossly negligent and incompetent response (potentially even criminal?) from the administration.
How do you figure that? Taking the example of Germany, their numbers of new cases and new deaths from the same source are ~2x less than the US per population. By what metric is Germany doing much worse than the USA right now?
Germany is basically the best case for Europe and had 199 deaths today, with a quarter the population of the US (who had 485 deaths).
* 506 deaths in France (a fifth of the US population)
* 213 in the UK (equiv. to 1000/day in the US)
* Switzerland tracking at 100 deaths a day, equivalent to over 4000/day in the US
* 162 deaths in Czechia, equiv. to 5346/day in the US
EU cases started climbing earlier than the US, and new daily cases have peaked and are descending.
Plotted here, 1 September to present, are the largest EU states: France, Spain, UK, Germany, and Italy, vs. US. (The tool is capped at five comparisons). Shown are new daily cases, normed to population, 14 day smoothing (to clarify trend).
Substitute otheer countries as you prefer. Note that Poland, Czechia, and Switzerland have comparatively small populations (38m for Poland v. 84m for Germany).
US cases are still climbing, EU are falling. France peaked on 2 November, 14 days ago, deaths attributed to those cases are just now being reported, but willdecrease rapidly.
Meantime US cases are still growing exponentially, with over 1 million new cases (at a 3% CFR) in the past week alone.
Calling the US situation "better" than Europe is ignoring the inevitable tragedy facing the US. As with this past spring, a few weeks lag on the epidemic curve can not be represented as evidence of superior situation. The future is here, it's just distributed more in Europe than the US presently. The US will get what's due it within 2-3 weeks, possibly sooner.
I did look it up myself. I used the 7 day moving average to get more stable results and Germany is 2x better than the US in new cases/deaths per million right now even while having 3 to 5x less cases/death in total since the start which means it also has a more vulnerable population at this point. I didn't pick Germany, you did, and claimed it was "much worse". And it's not the best case, there are several countries doing better or much better than Germany.
As for the other examples Europe is now having a second wave after successfully suppressing the first one. The US has never suppressed the pandemic, or at best is now at a third wave, and thus has a currently less susceptible population from all the cases and deaths it has already had. And even then it's still having more new cases and new deaths than the well managed countries in Europe (Germany, Norway, Finland, Denmark, etc). It's hardly in a better situation right now as you claim. The worst countries in Europe are at the US accumulated average, some are catching up but the US is also spiking right now.
At this writing, Europe as a whole has a population of 747.8 million, and 14.1 million COVID-19 cases, for a population-adjusted rate of 18,900 per million.
The US incidence rate is 34,400/1M, 182% of Europe's.
EU has 8.57m active cases for a 11,500/1M active case rate.
US has 4.23m active cases, for 12,800/1M active case rate.
Note that Spain, UK, Netherlands, and Sweden don't report on active or recovered cases. Nor does the US state of Oregon.
The margin is much thinner, though reported data still give the edge to the EU. Given that Spain and the UK represent large current EU outbreaks, that margin could shift to the advantage of the US.
I'll note that US cases are continuing to grow largely unhindered whilst several EU outbreaks (notably France) may have peaked as lockdowns' impacts are seen.