How many of the 164,000 COVID deaths in the US were preventable, if we had a better response, leadership, & had done things sooner rather than playing defense? @ASlavitt

I estimate >70% less deaths. Here’s how. We are at ~490 deaths per million. Germany is 110 per million.
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Germany is a good country to benchmark to. It has done a good job on COVID, and a country in Europe which we has good financial resources like us. Germany was surrounded by cases in Europe. But contained COVID. Germany’s 110 per million deaths is where we could have been.

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If we benchmark to other European countries like Denmark, Austria, Finland, & all of Eastern Europe; the deaths per million in those countries are much lower than Germany. If we were to have acted like like them, we would have >80-90% less deaths.

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I’m not even comparing us to Asian countries like S. Korea or Japan who have 6 to 8 deaths per million. If we were to have performed like them, we would have >95% fewer deaths.

So my estimate of >70% preventable deaths is conservative.

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We are lower in deaths per million compared to 5 countries in Europe: Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, & Sweden. Like us, it was failure of leadership and/or they got hit before they knew what hit them (Italy, Belgium, Spain) coz they didn’t have the extra month we did (Feb)
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Well we won’t be lower that Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, and Sweden for long, if we don’t slow down.

The only other countries with deaths per million higher than us in the whole world are Andorra, Peru, and Chile.

Brazil is just below us.
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When we want to estimate how many deaths could have been prevented we need to compare ourselves to countries with similar resources who acted efficiently. We can’t compare ourselves to countries who may have made same mistakes like us, or didn’t have fair warning.
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This is why I don’t feel comforted that our deaths per million is lower than UK, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, or Spain.

We saw Lombardy. But we still couldn’t prevent New York.

We can still turn things around. I really hope we do.
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By the way. I did intentionally leave out the #1 country in deaths per million San Marino: the total population of San Marino is 33,000.

We can forgive them. Their rate is lower than deaths per million in NY, NJ, MA, and CT.

. @ASlavitt had a great thread that highlighted the number of deaths that could have been prevented, and listed what we can do to turn things around. https://twitter.com/aslavitt/status/1291146800766885889