9/11/20
By David Leonhardt
"The virus is a marathon: Last week’s newsletter comparing the U.S. coronavirus death toll to the global average helped spark a continuing debate: What’s the fairest expectation of how bad the pandemic should have been in this country? Your answer to that question guides your judgment of the Trump administration’s response. Ross Douthat of The Times has argued that it was merely mediocre, while Vox’s German Lopez and The Atlantic’s David Frum consider it to have been far less effective than other countries’ responses.
One of the people who’s weighed in - via email - is Donald McNeil. By now, you may know him as the Times science reporter who has frequently appeared on “The Daily” podcast to talk about the coronavirus. Donald makes a fascinating point: Don’t look only at snapshots, like a country’s per capita death toll. “It’s not fair to pick one point in time and say, ‘How are we doing?’” he writes. “You can only judge how well countries are doing when you add in the time factor” - that is, when the virus first exploded in a given place and what has happened since.
The pandemic, he adds, is like a marathon with staggered start times. The virus began spreading widely in Europe earlier than in North America. Much of Europe failed to contain it at first and suffered terrible death tolls. The per capita toll in a few countries, like Britain, Italy and Spain, remains somewhat higher than in the U.S. But those countries managed to get the virus under control by the late spring. Their caseloads plummeted.
In the U.S., the virus erupted later - yet caseloads never plummeted. Almost every day for the past six months, at least 20,000 Americans have been diagnosed with the virus. “Europe learned the hard lesson and applied remedies,” as Donald says. “We did not, even though we had more warning.” This chart makes the point:
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By The New York Times | Sources: Johns Hopkins University and World Bank
The population-adjusted death toll in the U.S. surpassed Western Europe’s two months ago. The U.S. toll is far above those of France, Germany, Canada, Japan, Australia and many other countries - and is on pace to overtake Italy’s in the next few days and Britain’s and Spain’s not long after that.
Donald does add one important caveat. “We won’t really be able to judge until it’s over,” he says. Cases have recently begun rising again in Spain and some other parts of Europe, raising the possibility that Europe is on the verge of a new surge of deaths. In the U.S., Labor Day gatherings and the reopening of some schools may cause new outbreaks - or may not.
For now, the simplest summary seems to be this: Adjusting for time, there is no large, rich country that has suffered as much as the U.S."
Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 28,152,000
people, according to official counts, including 6,416,757 Americans.
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Updated 9/11/20, 3:28 A ET
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