I have been recording the daily Covid-19 statistics for both my own state and 8 nations. Those nations are the U.S., the U.K., Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and South Korea. That undertaking has helped me navigate through some of the claims made about our nation and the pandemic.
President Trump seems to have announced that our problems with Covid-19 are over in a mission accomplished mode. And he claimed that we have the best testing in the world. Unfortunately, the statistics do not support his claims. In terms of testing, the U.S. is in 11th place in the world in terms of the number of people per million tested. In terms of the 8 nations I am keeping track of, the U.S. ranks 5th behind Spain, Italy, Germany, and the U.K. (click here).
In comparing the infection rates of the U.S. with those nations that I am tracking and have tested more people per million than the U.S., the U.S. is in fourth place behind Germany, the U.K., and Italy. For those statistics, I am dividing the number of total cases for each nation by their latest population count recorded by the World Bank. If memory serves, for most, if not all 8 nations, those numbers were recorded in 2018. Do so provides a certain uniformity in the measurements I get. In addition, I use statistics from Johns Hopikins University to obtain the total number of cases.
In addition, of the 8 nations I am tracking, the U.S. ranks third in the number of deaths from the virus per 100 thousand in population. The U.S. ranks well behind both South Korea and Germany. Again, those statistics came from Johns Hopkins University (click here).
What do the tiny sample of statistics I have accumulated tell us? First, that the U.S. is not the best nation in either testing or responding to the virus. Second, that Trump's boisterous claims about the U.S. are false. And we could add to that that Trump's claims cannot be solely blamed on Trump trying to sell his presidential performance. We Americans have been telling ourselves that we are the best in the world for our whole lives. And not only do we believe that we are the best, we believe that being the best entitles us to judge and execute judicial sentence on any nation that is small enough for us to be able to physically control them.
If you are going to keep track of the international statistics like I am doing, I strongly suggest that you use the statistics from Johns Hopkins. That is because they tabulate confirmed cases only, they do not include probable cases in their statistics.
Finally, after noting that the U.S. is not the best nation in the world for testing or in responding to the pandemic, we should note another form of American Exceptionalism in how some protesting the states's lockdowns. Many of those protesters are in denial of the dangers posed by the Covid-19 virus. For some have conducted protests demanding that state officials open up the state. But it is more than just making a political demand, many of these protesters are protesting and acting as if there was no pandemic involving a very contagious disease. Somehow those protesters live in denial of what many other places in the world have experienced. So they not only seem to believe that they are exceptional and physically superior to both other parts of the nation that have been hit harder than they have been, they do so brandishing weapons. In the view of one religious blog commentator, being able to carry weapons into a protest is an example of white privilege (click here).
However, we should also note that there is a lot about the virus that we do not yet know. And thus, it would be premature to form many firm conclusions about what we have done right and what we have done wrong. In addition, the virus has put the nation in uncharted waters. While many state government officials are trying to err on the side of caution, we should all be slow to speak when judging our fellow citizens because they are not responding to the virus the way we ourselves have been. But that hasn't been the case with governors who insult those who defy their orders while the citizens yearn for smoking gun of a conspiracy. Such a division indicates that the current storm that our nation is experiencing may not dissipate after the pandemic is over.
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