Is The US Doing A Bad Job Handling The COVID 19 Pandemic?

Yesterday I shared a chart on Facebook comparing the number of deaths from COVID 19 in the US to the number of deaths in 5 other countries: Mexico, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Japan. At first glance, you can see the US has more than double the amount of deaths as Mexico and as much as 134 times as many deaths as Japan. This makes the US look like it has a crazily disproportionate amount of deaths to other countries.

Here is the chart for your reference:

Someone then pointed out that this chart was misleading because it does not take into account that the US has a much larger population than those countries so of course we would have more deaths than them.

That got me thinking, he has a point. It does make sense that as a larger population we would have more. This person suggested I compare the US to China or India. That did not seem fair either since those two countries have more than 4 times the population of the US. So I decided to dig deeper and not just look at the number of deaths, but the percentage of each country's population that had died from this disease. Here’s what I found out and this was my response to his point.

My Response:

As was pointed out in a comment after I posted this, this chart may be misleading due to the fact it does not take into account each country's population. I am grateful for the comment because I did some research on my own and learned some interesting things. According to the US Census Bureau and Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the US accounts for 4% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s coronavirus cases. So what about the deaths from them? Below are the populations of each country, deaths in each country, and the percentage of the population dead. As you can see Mexico has the same percentage of the population dead as the United States and Italy is not far behind. Which this chart does not reflect at all. We must also take into account that the outbreak in the US is far from dying down, while Italy went from 919 deaths on March 27th at its peak to roughly 10-20 deaths a day consistently since July. So we can conclude should Italy remain on the same track and the US as well with anywhere from 300 to 1300 deaths a day since July these percentages will not remain close for long. However, when it comes to Mexico they seem to be in the same boat as us with only a slightly better daily death number ranging from 180 to 1000 a day consistently since July. However if Mexico’s daily death numbers continue or get worse then because they have less than half of the population of the US, then their percentage of the population dead will increase taking over the US in that department.

In the comment, it was suggested we compare the US with China and India as they have larger populations. Their populations number over 1 billion each while the US has a mere 328 million population. So this would not be a fair comparison for China or India. However the percentage of Us population dead (0.066%) is an astounding 8 times more than that of India (0.0077%) So including India in the chart, whose population is roughly 4 times larger than here in the US, would only make the US look worse, not better.

I won’t even bother with the comparison of China since I know their numbers are controversial and mistrusted by many of us here in America, but since it was mentioned in the comment section I did include its official numbers below for those who may be curious. I also included Indonesia’s numbers since they are the country with the closest population to the US and unfortunately we still have 15 times more percent of our population dead than they do.

To conclude I agree that this chart only shows the total number of deaths in 6 countries. It does not include the many other factors that contribute to the spread and lethality of the disease such as population, the geographical size of each country, level of medical care available, the financial ability of its citizens to stay home and isolate, the amount of warning time each country had to prepare, or their government's ability or desire to financially and medically support their people in this time of crisis so that they can isolate. Even if we were to include all of these factors it would still show that the United States has far more casualties than we should have had no matter how you cut the cake and therefore the chart stays on my page.

I am always grateful for anyone to question what I post because I want to make sure I am not promoting false information. I hope If any of you take the time to read this you’ll understand that the chart does not take into account the populations of each country, only the total number of deaths.

However, It does accurately show that the US is number 1 with approximately 217 thousand deaths as of today. Far ahead of Brazil which holds second place at approximately 150 thousand. Since we are so proud to say that we are the greatest country on Earth and we had plenty of warning ahead of time, we should not be in this position. We should be leading by example.

So to answer the question that is the title of this article: Yes, we are doing a bad job handling the COVID 19 pandemic compared to other nations. Hopefully, we can all see the seriousness of this disease and try to think of how our actions affect the country as a whole and not just what we want. Oftentimes doing what is best for everyone turns out to be what is best for ourselves as well.

Here are the countries that I mentioned and the ones from the chart ranked by highest to lowest in regards to the percentage of the population dead.

US Population: 328 million - Deaths: 217,738 - Percentage of Population Dead: 0.066%

Mexico Population: 126 million - Deaths: 83,096 - Percentage of Population Dead: .066%

Italy Population: 60 million - Deaths: 36,083 - Percentage of Population Dead: 0.060%

Canada Population: 37.5 million - Deaths: 9,557 - Percentage of Population Dead: 0.025%

Germany Population: 83 million - Deaths: 9,667 - Percentage of Population Dead: 0.012%

India Population: 1.38 billion - Deaths: 106,521 - Percentage of Population Dead: 0.0077%

Indonesia Population: 274 million - Deaths: 11,580 - Percentage of Population Dead: 0.0042%

Japan Population: 126.5 Million - Deaths: 1613 - Percentage of Population Dead: 0.0013%

China Population: 1.44 billion - Deaths: 4,634 - Percentage of Population Dead: 0.00032%

Populations were looked up on google, Deaths from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/, and the percentages of the population dead I figured multiplying by fractions and solving for X. Statistics for the daily death numbers for the US, Mexico, and Italy were found using Google Statistics.