Making America Great Again – was it really intended to make the USA have the highest Covid-19 death toll in the entire world, PLUS the highest infection rate? What a record!!
Please look at this table, which I compiled from data I found here and here. I have sorted it by the total number of reported Covid-19 deaths and left off almost all of the nations with less than three thousand cases, except for Taiwan and Vietnam.
If you look, you will see that the US (with 105 thousand deaths) is way ahead of every other country — in fact, it’s about the same as the next three or four nations combined (UK, Italy, Brazil, and France).
The US also has the highest number of reported cases in the entire world, with about 1.8 million; that’s roughly the same amount as the next seven nations combined (Brazil, Russia, UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, and India).
No Herd Immunity
People have been talking about herd immunity and low fatality rates. My calculations tell me that we are a long, long way from herd immunity anywhere, and that the fatality rates are rather high.
To get herd immunity, you need to have 70% to 90% of the population that has antibodies – either from a vaccine or from having contracted the disease and recovered by their own body producing the necessary antibodies. I simply divided the total number of reported cases (which is probably too low in every case, but I have no idea by what factor) by the population of each country. What I find is that not a single nation has reached even 1% of their population having been infected and recovered. The highest such rates are in the small nations of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Luxembourg, which have about 7 people diagnosed as having been positive per THOUSAND, that’s 0.7%. The US has about 0.55% positive.
No herd immunity there.
High Fatality Rates
If we divide the number of coronavirus deaths by the total number of cases, we get rather large percentages. For the world as a whole, it’s about 6%, and for the very worst-off nations like France, Belgium, Italy, the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, and Mexico, your chances of dying if diagnosed positive [EDIT] are over 10%.*
Scary.
| Total Reported Cases | Total Reported Deaths | Calculated fatality rate | Population, millions | Infection rate so far | |
| World | 6,104,980 | 370,078 | 6.06% | 7594 | 0.080% |
| United States | 1,811,016 | 105,295 | 5.81% | 327 | 0.554% |
| United Kingdom | 274,762 | 38,489 | 14.01% | 66 | 0.416% |
| Italy | 233,019 | 33,415 | 14.34% | 60 | 0.388% |
| Brazil | 501,985 | 28,872 | 5.75% | 209 | 0.240% |
| France | 151,496 | 28,771 | 18.99% | 67 | 0.226% |
| Spain | 239,429 | 27,127 | 11.33% | 46 | 0.520% |
| Mexico | 87,512 | 9,779 | 11.17% | 126 | 0.069% |
| Belgium | 58,381 | 9,467 | 16.22% | 11 | 0.531% |
| Germany | 183,411 | 8,602 | 4.69% | 83 | 0.221% |
| Iran | 151,466 | 7,797 | 5.15% | 82 | 0.185% |
| Canada | 90,516 | 7,092 | 7.84% | 37 | 0.245% |
| Netherlands | 46,442 | 5,956 | 12.82% | 17 | 0.273% |
| India | 182,143 | 5,164 | 2.84% | 10 | 1.821% |
| Russia | 405,843 | 4,693 | 1.16% | 144 | 0.282% |
| China | 83,001 | 4,634 | 5.58% | 1393 | 0.006% |
| Turkey | 163,103 | 4,515 | 2.77% | 82 | 0.199% |
| Sweden | 37,542 | 4,395 | 11.71% | 10 | 0.375% |
| Peru | 155,671 | 4,371 | 2.81% | 32 | 0.486% |
| Ecuador | 38,571 | 3,334 | 8.64% | 17 | 0.227% |
| Switzerland | 30,862 | 1,657 | 5.37% | 9 | 0.343% |
| Ireland | 24,990 | 1,652 | 6.61% | 5 | 0.500% |
| Indonesia | 26,473 | 1,613 | 6.09% | 268 | 0.010% |
| Pakistan | 70,868 | 1,519 | 2.14% | 212 | 0.033% |
| Chile | 94,858 | 997 | 1.05% | 19 | 0.499% |
| Philippines | 18,086 | 957 | 5.29% | 107 | 0.017% |
| Egypt | 23,449 | 913 | 3.89% | 98 | 0.024% |
| Colombia | 28,236 | 890 | 3.15% | 50 | 0.056% |
| Japan | 16,804 | 886 | 5.27% | 127 | 0.013% |
| Ukraine | 23,672 | 708 | 2.99% | 46 | 0.051% |
| Austria | 16,731 | 668 | 3.99% | 9 | 0.186% |
| Algeria | 9,394 | 653 | 6.95% | 42 | 0.022% |
| Bangladesh | 47,153 | 650 | 1.38% | 161 | 0.029% |
| South Africa | 30,967 | 643 | 2.08% | 58 | 0.053% |
| Denmark | 11,633 | 571 | 4.91% | 6 | 0.194% |
| Argentina | 16,201 | 528 | 3.26% | 44 | 0.037% |
| Hungary | 3,876 | 526 | 13.57% | 10 | 0.039% |
| Saudi Arabia | 85,261 | 503 | 0.59% | 34 | 0.251% |
| Dominican Republic | 16,908 | 498 | 2.95% | 11 | 0.154% |
| Panama | 13,018 | 330 | 2.53% | 4 | 0.325% |
| Finland | 6,859 | 320 | 4.67% | 5.5 | 0.125% |
| Czech Republic | 9,233 | 319 | 3.45% | 11 | 0.084% |
| Bolivia | 9,592 | 310 | 3.23% | 11 | 0.087% |
| Moldova | 8,251 | 295 | 3.58% | 3.5 | 0.236% |
| Israel | 17,024 | 284 | 1.67% | 9 | 0.189% |
| Nigeria | 9,855 | 273 | 2.77% | 196 | 0.005% |
| South Korea | 11,468 | 270 | 2.35% | 52 | 0.022% |
| Sudan | 4,800 | 262 | 5.46% | 42 | 0.011% |
| United Arab Emirates | 33,896 | 262 | 0.77% | 10 | 0.339% |
| Afghanistan | 15,205 | 257 | 1.69% | 37 | 0.041% |
| Serbia | 11,381 | 242 | 2.13% | 7 | 0.163% |
| Norway | 8,437 | 236 | 2.80% | 5 | 0.169% |
| Belarus | 42,556 | 235 | 0.55% | 9.5 | 0.448% |
| Kuwait | 27,043 | 212 | 0.78% | 4 | 0.676% |
| Morocco | 7,783 | 204 | 2.62% | 36 | 0.022% |
| Honduras | 5,094 | 201 | 3.95% | 9.6 | 0.053% |
| Iraq | 6,179 | 195 | 3.16% | 38 | 0.016% |
| Cameroon | 5,904 | 191 | 3.24% | 25 | 0.024% |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 2,510 | 153 | 6.10% | 3 | 0.084% |
| Bulgaria | 2,453 | 140 | 5.71% | 7 | 0.035% |
| North Macedonia | 2,226 | 133 | 5.97% | 2 | 0.111% |
| Armenia | 9,282 | 131 | 1.41% | 3 | 0.309% |
| Malaysia | 7,819 | 115 | 1.47% | 32 | 0.024% |
| Luxembourg | 4,016 | 110 | 2.74% | 0.6 | 0.669% |
| Croatia | 2,246 | 103 | 4.59% | 4 | 0.056% |
| Australia | 7,193 | 103 | 1.43% | 25 | 0.029% |
| Guatemala | 4,739 | 102 | 2.15% | 17 | 0.028% |
| Cuba | 2,025 | 83 | 4.10% | 11 | 0.018% |
| DR Congo | 3,046 | 72 | 2.36% | 84 | 0.004% |
| Azerbaijan | 5,494 | 63 | 1.15% | 10 | 0.055% |
| Thailand | 3,081 | 57 | 1.85% | 69 | 0.004% |
| Tajikistan | 3,807 | 47 | 1.23% | 9 | 0.042% |
| Oman | 11,437 | 46 | 0.40% | 5 | 0.229% |
| Senegal | 3,535 | 41 | 1.16% | 16 | 0.022% |
| Kazakhstan | 10,858 | 40 | 0.37% | 18 | 0.060% |
| Ghana | 7,881 | 36 | 0.46% | 30 | 0.026% |
| Ivory Coast | 2,799 | 33 | 1.18% | 25 | 0.011% |
| Guinea | 3,706 | 23 | 0.62% | 12 | 0.031% |
| Singapore | 34,884 | 23 | 0.07% | 5.6 | 0.623% |
| Djibouti | 3,194 | 22 | 0.69% | 1 | 0.319% |
| Bahrain | 10,793 | 18 | 0.17% | 1.5 | 0.720% |
| Uzbekistan | 3,554 | 14 | 0.39% | 33 | 0.011% |
| Taiwan | 442 | 7 | 1.58% | 24 | 0.002% |
| Vietnam | 328 | 0 | 0.00% | 96 | 0.000% |
* EDIT: The divisor here is the number of people who have been formally and medically diagnosed as positive. The number of people who have actually been exposed to COVID-19 is probably considerably higher than the number of people who have tested positive, since no country is testing every single citizen, and the technicians are not testing people randomly.
By what factor is the reported positive rate in the various nation’s populations too low? I cannot say, and I’m positive it varies a lot from nation to nation and even within any country or state or region.
CDC gives a much lower fatality rate than I do – they estimate it to be under 1%, which would mean that every single reported positive case represents about 10 to 60 people who got the infection and fought it off unknowingly. That’s the only way you can lower a 6% fatality rate to 0.6% or 0.1%. Does that sound reasonable to you? It would be nice if that were true, but I rather doubt it.
