[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.

[pedrocr]

So from "much worse" it's now "not materially worse". In reality the numbers say Germany is actually much better, and it's 84 million people that you are now excluding from the analysis.

Picking other individual countries is a poor analysis. Take the whole EU or another group that's comparable to the US. Otherwise the same can be done for US states. But you were also given numbers for those that showed the opposite and doubled down. You already have a conclusion are are making the data fit.

> 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.

It's not irrelevant in the context I used it. Which was to explain how you were cherry-picking a very specific case.

[esja]

Population - Country - Deaths 60,427,888 - Italy - 731 65,328,048 - France - 506 68,021,208 - UK - 213 37,831,020 - Poland - 357 8,678,393 - Switzerland - 72 83,783,942 - Germany - 257 11,608,351 - Belgium - 195

Look at the map. These are reasonable choices. I haven't cherry picked them, e.g. I included Germany and excluded Czechia.

This is 335M people and 2331 deaths.

That is AT LEAST DOUBLE the current daily death rate in the USA.

There are many other ways of grouping European countries to achieve the same outcome, which is to show that contrary to the original commenter's position, right now, the USA is not the worst hit place on Earth, if you measure the problem by the number of people who are currently dying every day. I live here and that is the number that matters the most.

Here is my original comment, which is totally consistent with the numbers above (with the exception of Germany as an individual nation, but this is irrelevant as it's now in the aggregate):

"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."

Of course you can select many other ways of grouping the data and many other ways of choosing the numbers to achieve the outcome you want. That is not relevant to the point I have been making.

Thanks for the discussion.