US now nation with most coronavirus cases

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52056586

by doener • 6 years ago

86 101 6 years ago

Should say "most confirmed" cases since the actual number of infections is completely unknown. But given the minimal testing in the US, and the failure of many state governments to suppress the transmission rate, it's hard to imagine another nation surpassing the number of US cases.

solean• 6 years ago

It's really not that hard to imagine China having more cases...

llampx• 6 years ago

I watched a few videos from China and they seemed to be taking it very seriously, nothing like how the US is handling it.

Retric• 6 years ago

I doubt China could have kept a lid on things if the virus has been spreading uncontrollably. Further, the majority of documented cases from the peak have recovered. Which means the associated undocumented cases from then also recovered.

So, while they might have had more total cases, we likely have far more active cases.

tyingq4• 6 years ago

Or to imagine the draconian measures that limited the cases. I imagine there was a little of both.

mbrubeck2• 6 years ago

The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong's newspaper of record) reports that China excluded 43,000 confirmed-but-asymptomatic cases from its official statistics, and kept the true number classified:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076323/thir...

This would mean that the true number of confirmed cases in China is more than 50% higher than the official number.

standardUser11• 6 years ago

At a certain point it's not about hiding cases, it's about hiding thousands of deaths and overwhelmed hospitals, complete with temporary tent facilities we could see easily by satellite.

Edit: Feel free to downvote this, but please offer an explanation as to precisely how China could be hiding an outbreak of any significant scale.

hprotagonist2• 6 years ago

india comes immediately to mind, in, uh ... 8-12 days probably?

zik• 6 years ago

India have implemented nation wide lockdown so maybe they'll be ok.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-52044058/coronavirus-first...

DyslexicAtheist• 6 years ago

add Latin America too. also Russia (not as densely populated though)

pritovido• 6 years ago

India has lots of young people. Young people are not affected as badly as old people.

Also India has no Winter, only Monsoons, wet and dry. It is warn and dry there now.

It seems this virus propagates much better in cold weather.

SigmundA• 6 years ago

Just watched Trump get questioned on this and he implied its because we have done the most testing of anyone and China was under reporting.

tyingq4• 6 years ago

I try to avoid politics here. But our current state around testing, consistent policy, communication, coordinated efforts around supply shortages, etc. I'm embarrassed to be a US citizen right now.

We could be so much better at this with really very little effort. Lots of capable people just needing direction. I wish the president would appoint a credible corona-czar and give up the microphone.

standardUser11• 6 years ago

The US has been doing a lot of testing for literally just a few days. Spain has over twice the testing rate (per capita) as the US, and Italy several times more than that.

tlrobinson• 6 years ago

US testing started out slow but it's now up to 100,000 tests per day (and more than half a million total), which I think is the most of any country (though probably not per capita)

https://covidtracking.com/us-daily/

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing-source-data (hasn't been updated in a week)

the84723• 6 years ago

Are they doing population-level randomly sampled testing?

dmarchand90• 6 years ago

In New York the governor has said they are testing more per capita than anywhere in the world.

downerending4• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, it's pretty easy to imagine India doing so, given the size of their population and many challenges.

HellDunkel2• 6 years ago

I am not an expert but i am really puzzled by how one may think any goverment could stop a virus from spreading. Do you really think China managed to block the virus inside its borders when it already made it to other continents? That is utterly ridiculous.

seemslegit11• 6 years ago

Should adjust for population, but then the US will actually come out remarkably good in terms of both confirmed cases and mortality rates and whatever political/social case to be made on this will be lost.

ck22• 6 years ago

You realize this is just the very beginning right?

Hospitals are already overwhelmed, what do you imagine is going to happen when the number continues to double every five days?

It's exponential. Start of the curve.

tomohawk• 6 years ago

Japan seems to be doing fine with minimal testing.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/japans-winning-its-quiet-fight...

standardUser11• 6 years ago

Japan is an enigma and I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation of how they have kept transmission and fatalities so low despite minimal government efforts.

DiogenesKynikos• 6 years ago

The true numbers won't be known until serological studies are conducted. It's possible to tell who has had the virus, even months after the fact, by testing for antibodies in serum.

However, given how differently the US and China have responded to the virus, it's hard to see how the US will not surpass China (if it hasn't already done so) in total number of cases.

seemslegit11• 6 years ago

Not per-population it isn't, not even close in fact - far bellow Italy,Spain and even considerably bellow Germany and France.

Per-population mortality rate is also closely tracking Germany rather than Italy on Spain, beats UK by being less than half of theirs.

k__• 6 years ago

Germany has a pretty low death count, especially for being the most populous EU country.

seemslegit11• 6 years ago

Yes, and adjusted for population the US is doing only slightly worse

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

It's probably not even true at an absolute level. China likely had over a million cases.

dustingetz• 6 years ago

Lets say China has 81 million infections. That's 3.3 doubling periods away, or 17 days

jsyedidia2• 6 years ago

One should of course normalize by population. The USA has a population of 327 million. Eight nations in Western Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany) which are the core of the EU, have a population of 303 million. The US has 82,612 cases today according to worldometers.info. Those eight nations in Western Europe have a total of 289,767 cases today, which is about 3.78 times the US rate on a per capita basis.

seemslegit11• 6 years ago

This, so much this. Especially for mortality rates where the US is currently doing better than most large developed countries.

jsyedidia2• 6 years ago

For deaths, the USA has a total of 1,184, and the 8 countries of Western Europe have 15,437, or about 14 times higher on a per-capita basis.

grecy2• 6 years ago

Especially for mortality rates where the US is currently doing better than most large developed countries

That's to be expected, because deaths lag behind infections by a week or two. [1] and we know the US was a couple of weeks behind Italy and Spain in their infections blowing up.

We'll have to wait until a couple of weeks after peak infections before we can see the true mortality rate in any given region/country.

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/9350/1*r-ddYhoUtP_se6x-NOEinA.pn...

KSteffensen• 6 years ago

Minor correction: Switzerland is not a member of the EU

tibbydudeza• 6 years ago

And China has a population of 1.3 billion ... it is pretty clear what has worked better than the current shoddy approach.

seemslegit11• 6 years ago

China had a 6-4 months heads up, and their data is still questionable.

standardUser11• 6 years ago

The testing rate to date in Spain is about 2x that of the US per capita. In Italy it is closer to 4x. That, plus the complete failure of the US to suppress transmission rates throughout huge parts of the population, must be taken in to account.

downerending4• 6 years ago

complete failure of the US to suppress transmission rates

Hmm. Our curves look exactly like Spain and Italy, and indeed almost every exposed country appears to be on the same curve (with differing lags).

A few countries seem to be doing significantly better, but it's far from clear why.

leereeves• 6 years ago

Are you using the latest numbers? More tests are being done every day now in the US than had been done total about a week ago, and we're up to 520,000 tests.

https://twitter.com/COVID19Tracking/status/12432908485082603...

krcz2• 6 years ago

The USA started later and seems to have quicker growth rate. There is still time to catch up.

tucosan• 6 years ago

There is still time to catch up.

What do you base this statement on?

underyx3• 6 years ago

At the same time, New York, with a population of 19.5M, has nearly half as many cases as Italy, which has a population of 60.5M.

But then we can drill further and compare Lombardy, which has a similar population to NYC's. They have 35k and 22k cases, respectively.

I think the only thing we learned here is that snap-judgement narratives are fairly useless here. Just look at the raw data if you want to have an opinion, it's quite accessible.

2019-nCoV5• 6 years ago

Compare the CFR of Lombardy and NYC.

oco101• 6 years ago

Well, this is only the beginning, it is gonna get really bad and quick. USA will have the highest number of infections normalized by the population and most likely the highest dead rate also. The reason is USA only started testing and only 21 states told people to stay home as of today.

sanid• 6 years ago

Do you also take testing per capita into account? The US seems to be far behind on that. Or the US has found a super effective approach that no other nation has found to this kind of test/positives ratio. Also these countries don't seem to be at the same point in time as the US, we know the US is a week or two behind some of them. Comparing them like is not really fair.

lokedhs• 6 years ago

How is Switzerland part of the core of the EU when they're not a member of the EU?

2019-nCoV5• 6 years ago

Cases are only skyrocketing inline with testing. You can see how incompetent most nations have been [1]. The handful of countries that have exceeded US testing figures all have some of the lowest CFRs:

Australia — 0.46%

Germany — 0.6%

Russia — 0.13%

South Korea — 1.41%

US — 1.43%

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing

seemslegit11• 6 years ago

More aggressive testing explicitly lowers CFR, as the harder cases that will eventually die are confirmed under both strict and aggressive testing policies but the light cases are only confirmed by more expansive testing.

2019-nCoV5• 6 years ago

Exactly my point. Rising confirmed cases is mostly just a proxy for test penetration.

seanalltogether• 6 years ago

The death rate is worrying for the US right now because it's currently accelerating, not decelerating like many other countries that are in full lockdown. I guess we'll have to give it a few more days to validate, but they could actually cross the line into deaths doubling every 3 days.

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

downerending4• 6 years ago

Since a lot of the world's population is in places where testing is very limited or nonexistent, this distinction might not mean very much.

Probably more useful is to watch the death count. Even there, though, many will not necessarily be correctly attributed to the virus, given that hotspots can be overwhelmed and politics in general.

doitLP• 6 years ago

What blatant fear-mongering clickbait.

That may be a marginally interesting data point, but it’s meaningless without saying the number by population.

“Global epicentre of pandemic”? C’mon.

blackrock2• 6 years ago

Somehow, this is one area, that we don’t want to be #1 in.

rambojazz• 6 years ago

Not really a fair comparison. Should rather compare to the EU, which has almost 300K cases now.

US now nation with most coronavirus cases

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