Taps Coogan – January 27th, 2021

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Despite the incessant effort to politicize the Covid outbreak and response in the US, the US effort with Covid has not been uniquely bad.

The reason that the US has the most Covid cases in the world really does have a lot to do with the fact that the US has done the most tests in the world by a wide margin.

Remember, the US is the third most populous country in the world. The only two more populous countries are China and India. China claims just 450 cases between early March 2020 and mid January 2021, a stupendous lie for a country with 1.44 billion people sharing land borders with 14 countries that have collectively reported over 10 million cases during that time frame. India has over four times as many people as the US and has performed half as many Covid tests. It’s no wonder that they have reported fewer cases.

Fatality rates per capita are a more ‘fair’ metric for comparing Covid outbreaks between developed countries because, presumably, people sick enough to die of Covid are getting tested at a high rate in all developed economies regardless of how prevalent testing is for mild cases. The US fatality rate remains lower than in Belgium, the UK, the Czech Republic, and Italy, and is roughly inline with the average for Western Europe.

Meanwhile, the US and the UK are crushing the EU in the race to deploy Covid vaccines, as the following chart from Nordea reveals.

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