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Originally Posted by gnadfly
Two of those countries are basically small, isolatable islands.
S. Korea is on a pennisula which is backed by totalitarian N. Korea.
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And you previously mentioned New Zealand, which controlled Covid not because it was an island nation, but rather because they had a severe lockdown. Also I believe the majority of the people in Hong Kong live in Kowloon and the New Territories, which are not islands.
There are reasons why the three countries I mentioned should have had more Covid cases and more Covid deaths per capita than the USA. Hong Kong has overland road and rail connections to China. All three countries had lots of people traveling back and forth to Wuhan. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon have a much higher concentration density than New York City. (You may recall people here saying Covid would never spread in Texas like it did there because people are more spread out.) Population density in Taiwan and South Korea is much higher than the USA.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gnadfly
Right, China followed their CDC advise. That's why 50K just in the Wuhan province died in a few months.
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Not true. This article was written by an American that has been living in China and researching the pandemic, in addition to teaching, this year.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...he-coronavirus
From memory, based on the article, the official count in Wuhan is around 4000 deaths, but in reality around 12,000 may have died. The reason for the undercounting? The same reason we've probably undercounted Covid deaths in the USA, there were people who died without ever having been tested, especially during the early days of the epidemic when the Chinese didn't know what they were dealing with.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gnadfly
All large non totalitarian countries had fatalities numbers in the same ballpark. People in these Asian countries wear masks at the drop of a hat. Some of the numbers, like from Mexico aren't believeable. How is the US to contract trace when we can't control who comes across the border? You must not remember that much of the PCP equipment was being hoarded by Asia. In fact, the stuff I bought from Costco is made in China.
Only one country is headed by President Trump.
Where are all these other countries vaccines and cures?
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By the numbers, in terms of deaths per capita, among developed countries, only Belgium and Spain have done worse than the USA:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
(Note: I kicked out Andorra and San Marino, which have populations of 76,000 and 35,000 respectively.)
Three things affect how a country performs in controlling this pandemic,
1. The quality of the institutions. In our case that would be the hospitals, CDC, FDA, and state and local health departments.
2. The quality of the politicians, our president, governors, congressmen and state legislators, mayors, county commissioners, county judges (in Texas), etc.
3. The people. Do they believe in the science and take the steps necessary to slow spread of the pandemic.
South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong performed very well by all three criteria. The U.S.A. has fallen short in all three.
I took a look at Germany this morning, to try to come up with something to respond to your post, as they appear to have done a good job. The Germans have only had 120 deaths per million population compared to 690 for the USA. By criteria "1" and "2" they've done a great job. Angela Merkel is a scientist who "gets it", and I bet that's repeated in other government positions. Their public health experts were on top of this from the start. They had a test ready to go long before we did, that was adopted by the WHO. Our CDC and FDA were too arrogant to adopt it and wasted precious time getting testing up and going. And the Germans did a very good job of contact tracing. Like South Korea, they were able to isolate pockets of Covid and keep them from spreading. This article is worth a look,
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...virus-outbreak
However, Germany has fallen short in terms of "3" above. There are a lot of people there who think about Covid like you did back in May, and maybe still do. The epidemic didn't get completely out of control, and people questioned why they should wear masks and social distance. Actually, IHME, who track these kind of things, says only 50% of Germans now are wearing masks, compared to 70% in the USA. And we're doing a little better on social distancing than they are. The partying started going full force in Berlin and the epidemic's flaring up there.
The end result, this is about to take off in Germany unless there's another lockdown. When that happens, their superior institutions, contact tracing and testing won't do them as much good. How do you contact trace when a large percentage of the population has the disease?
Germany has less than 20% of the deaths per capita we do right now, but by February 1, IHME thinks that will be over 50%, if there's no lockdown.
Anyway, I guess my point is Trump isn't as relevant as hard core anti-Trumpers and Trump supporters would have you believe. He hasn't done a good job. But then neither have a lot of other people.
