[esja]

Over the past few weeks (i.e. right now), the number of deaths per capita in the European country I live in is far higher than the number of deaths per capita in the USA. Some of the best hospitals on Earth are running out of ICU beds. My country is not alone in this, as you can see in the numbers I provided. This is the context for my response to the original commenter.

You have a different way of measuring the problem and you are extrapolating into the future, and that is also fine. We are just making different points.

[pedrocr]

I'm not measuring different things. I've used initially the definition that seemed most appropriate to me as you didn't provide any and then the definition you chose. You're now using as an example an unnamed country. With the examples you gave it wasn't true in either of the metrics.

[esja]

I've been using daily deaths per capita and all the examples are correct by that metric.

Switzerland today:

- 4560 lab confirmed cases - 19'495 tests - 23,4% positivity rate - 299 hospitalised - 142 deaths

That's equivalent to 5400 deaths occurring today in the USA.

In recent days the USA had the following deaths: 740, 656, 1258, 1471, 1185.

So by this measure things are FOUR OR FIVE TIMES AS BAD in Switzerland as they are in the USA.

[pedrocr]

I've already given you the numbers for Germany which was your other example. It is actually 2x better than the US. Your claim was "most of highly-developed Europe". Germany isn't even the best case and the total EU metric also says the opposite.

[esja]

It is absolutely not 2x better than the USA. They had 196 deaths today which is equivalent to 772 in the USA, where there were 740 deaths yesterday.

It's very easy to look up other countries e.g. Czechia where things are far worse.

[pedrocr]

Germany is at 177 deaths per day with 84 million people, for 2.1 deaths per million per day. The US is at 1170 deaths per day with 332 million people, for 3.5 deaths per million per day. That's a factor of 1.7x worse by the US. In number of new cases it's worse.

You're doing math with the "Today" numbers that are not always reliable because not all US states have reported sometimes. The 7 day moving average numbers are more reliable.

It's also very easy to lookup countries like Denmark, Finland and Norway that are much much better. Picking individual small countries is not a great methodology, particularly Czechia that did extremely well in the first wave and thus has a much more susceptible population.

[esja]

I accept your point re Germany. It's not materially worse there right now.

But back to the original argument. How are the UK, France, Poland and Italy doing? Those are big European countries.

UK: 213 deaths France: 506 deaths Poland: 357 deaths Italy: 731 deaths

231 million people, 1807 deaths, more than 2x as bad as the USA. And that's before adding Switzerland, Czechia, and other countries where things are worse.

It's also irrelevant that Czechia did well in the first wave. This is about who is doing worse right now as measured by actual humans dying. The reasons don't matter.