I don't know, but some smaller countries have numbers that are pretty bad, while others have numbers that are pretty good, and so it might be a wash. I'll say I'm curious myself as to what happens if we look at the rate of infection of a population in rural versus urban areas. The county where I live in the US is not that densely populated and so far the infection count is low. My opinion: part of that is they won't give us widespread access to affordable hassle-free testing, part of it is that we generally spend more time without running into so many fellow citizens, and part of it is arguably an achievement of making the effort to follow advisable guidelines such as wearing masks (though I still see many without them) and not going out more than needed.

South Korea seems to be making better headway than the US against the foe. I wonder if this will demonstrably help their economy and jobs situations be better than in the US.

The Coronavirus Crisis
South Korea Reports No New Domestic Coronavirus Cases
April 30, 20206:10 AM ET
[npr.org]

Hi - basically I agree that my calculations are not that defensible. I am waiting for a decent competent mathematical epidemiologist and capable economist to make themselves useful (instead of just sitting in an ivory tower and doing nothing) and prominently publish regular updates that give a good idea of extra economic and health damage caused by having an incompetent in office in this situation. Until they do, I'm not sure, but I may continue to calculate once in awhile. Being silent in this situation, and letting dozens and hundreds of millions of Americans pretend that the situation is reasonably well-in-hand, is not that much of an option.

As to the deficiencies in what we know, on the data, I agree with some but not all. Yes, we have massive gaps. We can't expect testing and reporting mechanisms to be functioning at the same levels in al countries, and even in countries allocating plenty of resources trying to gather as much good data as possible, we're still not there at all, as far as having an accurate sense of what's going on. I've heard much higher estimates of general population infection. So, we're stumbling around.

(Indeed, if the general infection is past some point of no return, such that it is plausible to expect a vast number in some out-of-control outbreak countries to be infected prior to a vaccine being invented, then there is some argument to be made that those countries just go forward and hope for the best. The argument goes that doing this would not leave their economies totally in ruins. However, what's happening in the US is that this decision is being made by the President without consulting others or discussing the topic explicitly).

Still:

Some countries do appear to have stopped or severely slowed the outbreak. This is not a matter of hand-wringing over the data, but it just appears to be so. Never mind trying to take potshots at what political systems those countries have. At the other end of the spectrum, other countries have been dealing with a disaster, and their numbers are doubtless too low, but they are not being dishonest so much as just dealing with the data fog that goes with such a disaster. In the face of both of these, and in the face of the vast portions of the globe where we just don't have anything resembling good data, the best I can do here is use the word "reported" a lot.

I think a better interim method might be to compare the US numbers to the whole world ex-US (including wrong-data countries) but to a representative basket of countries, with different levels of success, but where the data appears to be more reliable. This is still badly imperfect, but would somewhat improve the perspective. I don't have the resources to do this at this time. This would involve professionals who engage in this sort of calculation regularly to publish, or maybe they have already done, and I just haven't seen it yet.

I wanted to add, my lengthy response is not meant to be overly argumentative, but I haven't had that much feedback, and I had some accumulated points to get off my chest in this area, so I used your post as a foil. I appreciated the response.

@kmaz You may be interested in my own figures, which show per capita mortality.

@Gareth

Thanks, good to see, and one can't miss the fact that so many highly developed and sophisticated European countries are among the hardest hit. It gives a person pause.

Cases and fatalities per million is part of the data that goes into my simplified calc.

there's one thing we all can do, vote the sucker out in November and get a real leader, which at this point in time is anybody but him

@Mofo1953 I will do my part to accomplish that, but unfortunately, ALL will not do that.

Hi - To an extent I agree - if one defines getting something done to be removal from office, or sidelining the obstructionists in the background, or putting into effect any sort of substantial change in the Senate or House in terms of thought leadership and day-to-day direction (this last being a conspicuous failure at the moment). We in the US would do well to recognize that the loss of life and health is horrible, concerns about GDP and government bankruptcy and jobs are clear, but this pandemic is also shining additional light on the long topic of overall US intellectual bankruptcy.

On this last point, there is something we can do, in a sense, and that something is (I think) to talk. I still see purported thinking US citizens, including many here on this site, spouting real nonsense unchallenged. To an extent the lack of challenge is more than understandable - we are all tired of the belligerence and of our offerings at communication and thought falling on deaf ears. However, sometimes I think we can find the stamina to discuss a bit.

We in the US have watched decades of our own cinema where we get to win the war and be the heroes, and here we are facing an honest-to-goodness life-and-death crisis impacting millions (if not billions) of US citizens and everyone else on the planet, and so far, while there are uncountable stories of quiet smart individual bravery, there is also the fact that we in the US are in some ways just floundering while our federal government makes genuinely stupid omissions, and taking genuinely stupid actions. Our President is one of the villains in this story that will be told for millenia, but so are "we".... those of us who have supported him, but also those of us who did not support him but somehow made our own contributions to the severe intellectual bankruptcy that has, over years and decades, finally resulted in a vile anti-human piece of garbage legally in office and openly trying to get US citizens killed.

If we are in the audience we can complain that's not how a good Hollywood movie should end, but we're actually in the movie, and I think our role, if we somehow want to pull ourselves together to get this going in a better direction, is somehow to turn around the intellectual bankruptcy, and everything that goes with it. That may sound insufficiently connected to the situation at hand, so I"ll add that a practical focus could be to discuss improving our understanding (even if some of us have to change our minds) of what is and is not a good smart response to the virus, and then contrasting that to the response of the federal government, and demanding more loudly that our elected representatives and news outlets, and all citizens in a position to make a difference do their God-Damned jobs and go to the mattresses and put into effect better policies even if it is too late for dozens of thousands of citizens already needlessly dead.

For example, from the beginning, this President has taken the position of referring to testing as though he and the government are doing citizens some sort of favor even to discuss it. This is the opposite of a rational intelligent educated understanding of the role of testing in an overall thoughtful intelligent competent response that includes several parts and which won't be effective if all of those parts are not in place. The role of testing in an intelligent response includes that those tested are able to make vastly better decisions about whether and when and how to stay home. They are able in some cases cautiously to go to work, especially if they can repeatedly be tested. If they find they are infected, they are able to help the overall effort (immensely) by staying away from infecting others while they are contagious.

None of these words have regularly escaped the President's mouth (at least not that I've heard) in part, I am surmising, because he actually wants to presume to harm a lot of us, and decide for us that we are just going to skip to the part where everyone gets infected, a lot of people die, but then we try to move on. He wants to do this without consulting us, and without consulting our representatives on the matter. He wants to do this against the efforts of genuine experts (of which he is not one).

He also preens a lot as someone who claims to be concerned about the economy and business and jobs, yet, it would have been very helpful to the economy if people had access to their infection status and could have made better decisions about whether to go to work. The President has for months been in the way of all citizens knowing their infection status. How is it going to be for American businesses when they are no longer competitive on the world stage because other countries are cautiously back on their feet, and we are still caught playing this middle-groud game, with some of our parents and others dead.

Anyway, I am out in the weeds discussing part of why I think testing is important, but the broader point is that we are in the middle of a battle, our elected Commander-In-Chief is a murderous incompetent at a record-setting scale, and when that situation manifests, one can at least discuss it and shed light on it, and mull it over, and figure out if, at the least, that incompetent can be quietly sidelined and more competent adults, however imperfect they may be, can take the helm without being fired for doing the right things, even as the incompetent is allowed to play with some distracting toys over in the corner.

Simultaneously, even if in some ways it is too late to avoid some of the more awful consequences of the intellectual bankruptcy that we see, we can at least discuss and shed light on it, and try to see what would be some advisable actions for our country, or its individual citizens to take, not only to deal with the virus, but to start talking about that intellectual bankruptcy which has (evidently) led us to the point where we are faced with a life-and-death threat and we are being led to death and economic ruin by someone that millions (or dozens of millions) of citizens still think is a worthy office-holder.