[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.