I’m asking here because I don’t think there’s a definite answer – other than, “He’s just making it up.” The U.S. covid deaths per million is now 429 (COVID - Coronavirus Statistics - Worldometer), which makes it the 10th highest in the world. Maybe he means the rate of total deaths to total cases? That would be about 3.8%, which as I’m eyeballing it, looks somewhat worse than average, but definitely better than a lot of countries.
“Just making it up” seems the most plausible to me. It’s his MO.
It’s a lie.
It’s kind of his thing.
Death rates between countries aren’t comparable anyway, everyone does it their own way.
Today it was revealed that England would count a COVID death as the death of anyone who at some point had been tested positive even if it was three or four months previously. The rest of the UK only counts a COVID death as someone who has died within 28 days of a positive test. So even within the UK it’s inconsistent.
I suspect some countries might discount altogether deaths where a person with a positive test result appears to have died from some other condition whether or not COVID was a contributing factor.
Click through the “Death Rate” link at the top of your cite. That leads to a page titled “Coronavirus (COVID-19) Mortality Rate” (my bolding)
In the intro they state (original bolding)
They then provide an example calulation for New York City. The estimate of actual cases, based on using antibody testing to capture those that were asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic and never tested for the disease itself, is actually about 10 times the number of reported cases. There estimates of actual deaths are about double the reported number of deaths.* For NYC they find
It is just one city, not the entire US, but it is a city that had medical care swamped by the number of serious cases. Still that is doing pretty well, whether world leading or not, on that specific metric.
You know how when Trump says that the US is best in testing, but you may not even be aware of where your local testing site is? The claim this thread is based on is the same concept, it’s bullshit. You ever hear Trump say “per capita”, as though he knew what it meant? I have, unfortunately.
why would that not be the answer? he IS just making it up.
Yep. He pulled it out of his ass.
It’s something I see only rarely in Australian politics, but is common in American society, and I don’t restrict that to Trump. The implicit belief that America is better. As:
American mortality rate is best, because America is better at these things.
Rather than the alternative:
America is better because American mortality rate is best.
As I’ve mentioned before, the characteristic Australian position would be:
Australia is best because we don't think we are better than anyone.
This differs only in that (a) Trump does this a lot, (b) Half of America is watching Trump for mistakes, and ( c) COVID is getting a lot of direct attention. To me, as an expatriate, it’s so normally American that is scarcely registers.
When it shows up in Australia, it normally is political ideas that are so fundamental that they are invisible, like: “Consolidation of government functions is good”, which follows from the invisible idea that unified/catholic government is better.
To Trump, and to a lot of Americans (not just his supporters), the idea that America is better is the invisible fact that underpins statements like “The US has one of the lowest covid mortality rates”, and is the true meaning of the statement.
You could say that it’s Art, not Science, but you’ll only understand that if you recognize that science has a transcendent spiritual value.
Well, I did see the World Meters link to calculating mortality rate, but it’s a bit hard to apply since it relies on making judgement calls on what the total fatalities and the total number of recovered are beyond the reported numbers. They compute it for NYC as 1.4% (Infection Fatality Rate).
The 0.28% figure Fiendish_Astronaut shows is the estimated total fatalities divided by the total population of NYC, which they call Crude Mortality Rate, and is based on May 1 numbers, so can only go up. What it means is between the six to seven weeks from the first NYC fatality to May 1, they estimate about one of every 350 New Yorkers died of Covid-19. Put that way, it does not sound like doing well to me.
He might be referring to something like this where you can see the US has the second-lowest case mortality rate of the 8 countries depicted. So Trump’s claim may not be strictly false but it’s deceptive.
Comparing case mortality rates (deaths divided by diagnoses) in the middle of a pandemic is problematic for a number of reasons. Here’s one of them: In a country like the US where cases are rising again, case mortality rates can be deceptively low. A lot of people have been diagnosed recently, making the denominator large. A certain proportion of the recently diagnosed people will likely die, but haven’t died yet, making the numerator relatively small. As the recently diagnosed patients start dying, the case mortality rate will go up again. When we go to calculate the case mortality rate in the US after the pandemic is over, it will almost certainly be higher than it is now.
On the other hand, in a country like Spain where cases have been falling for months, the vast majority of people who are going to die of Covid-19 have already died, so their case mortality rate is higher, closer to what the post-pandemic figure will show.
Hmm, that’s possible. That shows the U.S. falling below the world average for what they call Case Fatality Rate over the last month or so. Since that month has seen a huge increase in new U.S. cases, you could be right about that causing the drop in rate. Plus, the number of tests the U.S. is doing, which Trump says is what makes him look bad, is actually lowering the mortality rate, which he’s boasting about.
Even so, by these numbers, Trump’s claim would, in fact, be strictly false. If you flip over to the tabular data, where all the countries are listed, the U.S. is around 60th highest out of 200 or so countries (I made a quick count), so not one of the lowest even by an extremely generous interpretation of that vague definition.
Trump isn’t referring to any charts graphs or studies. He is referring to the words that come out of his mouth, unguided by logic, reason or fact. Y’all are going much too deep looking for what he is talking about.
Fair point. I’m not sure why this particular claim captures my attention either. I just now saw part of the Chris Wallace interview from the weekend. Trump calls for a chart to prove this claim, which, for some reason, McEnany has printed out and ready to hand to him. It looks similar to the one bibliophage linked to, but including lines for Italy, Spain, Germany, the world, the U.S., Brazil, South Korea, and Iceland, assuming Wallace’s later reproduction of it is accurate. If so, then Trump was ranting at Wallace for doubting his claim of the U.S. having the lowest mortality rate in the world with a chart that showed that by one particular and somewhat misleading measure, the U.S. has the fourth lowest mortality rate among seven countries the chart happened to show.
I think wou went a bit awry halfway through there. You give a definition for the Infection Fatality Rate where the denominator is the total number of people infected (including unconfirmed asymptomatic); but then you give the numbers for the Crude Mortality Rate, a different statistic for which the denominator is the total population size.
The estimates for NYC given on that site are (as of May 1st):
deaths = 23,000
cases = 1.7 million (10 times the number of confirmed cases)
population = 8.4 million
So we have
Infection Fatality Rate = 23,000/1.7M = 1.4%
Crude Mortality Rate = 23,000/8.4M = 0.28%
Shit. Yes. I was not happy with their layout for other reasons at the time. Jacked that up.
Trump is not interested in facts or truth. He is interested in giving his supporters ideas that allow them to continue supporting him. He is in the stage of keeping the investors on board until the deal is signed. He has been there many times before. Truth is not a factor. Giving his supporters another idea that allows them to continue on his side is everything. It doesn’t have to last-just last long enough.
There is a very good reason Trump wears Nomex pants.
Here’s the Politifact article explaining that the claim is outright false.
Once we’ve found it to be false I think that should be the end of it; we shouldn’t have to scurry off and try to find deeper meaning in something he just pulled out of his ass.
But I can speculate on why he said it:
Yeah. What’s happened here is that all of the metrics are just plain awful, but Trump wants this virus to just “magically” go away, and also wants to have some talking point to that effect.
So, among all the graphs he’s seen, there’s one where the US is at least on the right side of average. That became chinese whispered in his own brain to “The US has the best mortality rate”.
Or, not misremembered, just plain hyperbole because he loves hyperbole: he can’t say he’s not racist or he’s not guilty of a crime, he’s the least non-racist person, and in all American history the most innocent person (a sentence I can’t believe he wasn’t ridiculed more for). But at some point it seems he started to believe it, hence the exchange with Chris.
Probably due to the fact the average flu rates are extremely low this year while Corona deaths are high. If you die with Corona then you’ll be marked as a Corona death even though you died with a heart attack. I heard talk of even car crash deaths in Colorado and New York would mark you a Corona death if you had the disease. They’re marking every death Corona and the numbers are not accurate right now. For instance scientists believed we’d have 2million deaths in the first month. Well, we dont. Also New Yorks mayor is a moron for allowing covid infected into nursing homes which killed a lot of old folks.