LONDON — The British government says 759 more people with the coronavirus have died in U.K. hospitals, taking the total to 18,100.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1305414
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1305414
Under current trajectories by mid-May the U.S will have 1/2 the world’s total confirmed infections, and mortalities exceeding the immediate 6 nations combined behind us in the count. Widespread lifting of mitigation measures will further aggravate that.
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Wasn’t Boris Johnson an advocate of “herd immunity”? He is getting a political break out of sympathy just because he ended in the ICU. But he was Trump-grade bad in the handling of Coronavirus. In the next few weeks he will have to go to EU to ask for a further extension of the December 2020 deadline when they are kick out of the EU for good, other wise it will be a double-whammy on UK businesses.
Boris Johnson is going to succeed talking the UK to Greece’s level and kicked out of the G7.
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We’re much bigger than most other nations that have been hit by Covid-19, so comparing total numbers is pretty misleading. On a per capita basis, our overall mortality rate appears to be below (well below, in fact) Spain, Italy, France, the U.K., and even Switzerland.
The six nations behind us in the death tally have a combined population of 408 million. Ours is roughly 330 million. So, our rates of death per capita will soon exceed theirs.
Correction: Not deaths, but infections. My bad.
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Why the fuck do pols talk about the peak as if ‘it’s over and were fine now?’ THE ‘PEAK’ IS WHEN THINGS ARE THE WORST! It has zero to do with how quickly the numbers start to go down! Only a few nations are past the peak so far!
Sorry for the shouting.
Okay, I’m really not.
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The four nations immediately behind us have a combined population of 241 million, and they currently have almost twice as many total confirmed deaths as the U.S. (That’s Spain, Italy, France, and the U.K., if you want to check the math.)
In fifth place comes Belgium, which is way, way tinier than the U.S. and those other four countries, but also has a far higher rate of per capita deaths.
And in sixth place comes Iran, which has about the same total population as France and is pretty obviously lying about only having 5,300 deaths.
ETA:
Fair enough, but I don’t think the total infections numbers are in any way reliable for comparing countries against one another. Every country is testing differently, and the infections numbers generally only include those who have tested positive. I think just about everyone would agree that those tests are vastly undercounting the actual number of infected persons. Counting corpses is far more accurate than identifying everyone who has been infected, although really only the excess morbidity numbers are really going to give us a firm grasp on just how many people have been killed by this virus.
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Pity he made it.
I have no sympathy for anyone getting the virus as a result of their own stupidity and he is a prime example of this.
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Agreed. But I think combining a vast variety of criteria a plausible case could be presented the United States has handled this pandemic more ineptly the most other nations. Although others have screwed the pooch as well to be sure.
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BoJo and Bozo: a match made in heaven.
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What’s most telling to me, actually, is how broadly similar the curves have been in the U.S. and throughout Western Europe. Both places responded at least a couple weeks too late, and with varied levels and types of responses. The result has been pretty widely bad. The U.S. death rate so far has been below that of most countries in, at least, Western Europe, which may be attributable to our generally lower level of population density. But I suspect our mortality rate is going to end up looking pretty close to those of Italy and the U.K. as the virus is making its way into more rural populations (hello, South Dakota!).
I may be incorrect but my general impression is many nations have done a demonstrably better job in the area of testing.
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Oh sure, particularly in East Asia and, to a lesser extent, Germany, which is topping out (so far) with about half our death rate. But testing alone doesn’t keep a lid on things if you wait too long to roll it out, as the U.S. and Western Europe did. The model probably should have been South Korea which deployed heavily targeted testing and tracing early and has kept it up ever since (unlike Japan, where Covid-19 is exploding as a result).
NYT estimates there are about 6,300 unaccounted deaths so far this year in England and Wales, which implies the UK is now probably nearing 25,000 covid deaths.
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Which appears to be pretty similar to our own excess mortality numbers.
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BoJo has made as much of a mess as Skanky Turdface. Both are empty blowhards, weak inept conservatives and spineless cowards.