SOME PERSPECTIVE

{please share}

COVID-19 deaths in Iceland (): 10
COVID-19 deaths in Australia (): 106
COVID-19 deaths in Israel (): 348
COVID-19 deaths in Hungary (): 591
COVID-19 deaths in Japan (): 981
COVID-19 deaths in the United States (): 135,822

#TrumpVirus

PS/ Some wrongly think that virus transmission can be meaningfully compared using per capita deaths—though total population has nothing to do with virus spread (population density does). Saying Deaths/1M is "4" in Australia and "410" in America doesn't communicate much to anyone.

PS2/ Some say, "Most don't know Japan has 127 million citizens, and America has 330 million!" Okay—so Trump would be doing as well as Japan if America had 2,500 deaths instead of 135,822. Now you know. If you didn't know the size of Japan, why would you be able to do *that* math?

PS3/ What folks understand: when you open a paper in Japan, it says that in 2020, 981 people have died in Japan from COVID-19 and there were 197 new cases today. Open a paper in America, you see that 135,822 have died; 1,000 are dying daily; and there were 61,067 new cases today.

PS4/ So I've no patience with the "per capita" nonsense as a) it has nothing to do with virus spread, b) it produces numbers that folks are *less* likely to understand than even the simple numbers I'm giving, therefore c) it provides comfort to Trump under the cover of confusion.

PS5/ Also—what is this weird, sadistic assumption that because America has 250% the number of citizens Japan does, a thousand deaths in Japan "equals" 2,500 deaths in America? A death is a death. 981 Japanese citizens have died; 135,822 Americans have died. That's the comparison.