A related issue is the continued reporting of total cases as a headline number. This made sense in the early days, but not so much when the vast number of people infected have either recovered or died.
What matters from a pandemic control standpoint is the number of ACTIVE cases.
For example, Alberta has had 7543 cases. The media reports new cases like this: ‘Surge in infections raises Alberta’s total to 7543’. A casual reader woild think there are that many sick people in the province. Canada doesn’t even report active cases - just total, recovered, and dead. You have to do the math yourself, then you find out that of Alberta’s 7543 cases, only 531 are active. Diving deeper, you can find that in the entire province there are only 31 people in hospital due to COVID-19, and only 7 people are in ICU.
So these two statements are both true:
“Alberta Covid-19 cases rise to new high of 7543.”
“Active Covid-19 cases in Alberta decline to new low of 531.”
Both true, both imply very different things. The media always seems to choose #1, and the government doesn’t even directly report #2. But #2 is more important for decision-making, and the longer this goes on the less relevant the first figure will be.
It has both raw numbers and per capita, and you can restrict the graphs to only show the nations with enough people for per capita to be useful.
Canada currently has about 1/5th the rate of infection as the US. Texas doesn’t have a lot deaths yet, probably because deaths lag infection by about 3 weeks, but it has surpassed NY in infection rate, and seems to be running about average among US states for infection rate. (NY has dropped well below the US average, although it’s still higher than most of what we like to think of as our peer countries. Oh, except Sweden – Sweden is way up there, too.)
Why? The virus doesn’t know the population of the USA. On the contrary, why wouldn’t our large population, large economy, etc. have given us more tools with which to have stopped it early on?
Why shouldn’t we do something like multiply the figures by per capita GDP? The USA has close to the most resources per person to stop a pandemic, so shouldn’t our deaths count for extra rather than being divided down?
So what major public illnesses are reported per capita? AIDS in the 80s wasn’t reported that way, nor a bad flu season. Let’s face it this is another attempt to deflect blame from American leadership, especially the guy at top. That’s what every attempt to downplay the severity of the virus and its toll is, and it would be nice for the people flogging this narrative to just admit that’s what they’re trying to do.
Total deaths let’s you know HOW FUCKING MANY PEOPLE THAT HAVE NAMES AND FAMILIES DIED! Per capita is great for graphs and curves and statistics and policy plans of action and such. But actual human deaths of people you used to live with IS and WILL BE the story that really matter to the general population of fellow humans who care about humanity.
The fact that the virus doesn’t know how many people are in the US is precisely why the absolute number is meaningless. All that matters is the per capita number.
The country of San Marino currently has a total death count of 42. The US has a death count of 118,283. But when you look at the population count the per capita count for San Marino is 1237 vs 357 in the US. It lets us know how many people are affected in relation to each other. You are 3 1/2 more times likely to die of the virus in San Marino than in the US. Put another way we would have 413,990 dead in the US if we had the death rate of San Marino.
Yeah, but the death rate tells me how likely it is that I personally know any of those people. The death rate is high in my state, and I know several people who have died or lost a relative.
No fucking shit. I understand what per capita means. And I understand it’s uses. TOTAL deaths gets the headlines because the average human who cares about other humans wants to know how many names, how many faces, how many family’s were destroyed by whatever it is that is being talked about. Nobody but maybe MacNamara talked about the 3.8 million deaths in Vietnam in per capita numbers.
People want to know how likely they are to die from the disease. Total number is meaningless as I just showed with San Marino.
The people in New York needed to know what was going on and per capita numbers are the only quantifiable way of comparison. I don’t understand the vitriol you keep injecting into a simple conversation.
I look forward to the day when US media reports that deaths in say Dafur were 1,333 per 100,000 or that on a per capita basis not many Americans take pot shots at their President.
Would also bet dollars to donuts that COVID-19 had been totally confined to China that US media wouldn’t have been reporting their deaths on a per capita basis.
Per capita calculations assumes that the denominator is common, and in humanity terms certainly is, but when was the last time the US populace considered that one American life is precisely equal to say one Puerto Rican life?
I think both numbers are important, for all the reasons multiple posters have mentioned up-thread. Total numbers tell you the human toll so far. Per capita numbers maybe give you a sense of how at risk you and the people you care about are. But if you’re measuring effectiveness of countermeasures, isn’t per capita the more relevant figure?
I did like the idea of tracking it with GDP. Obviously whatever tracking method you use it’s more complicated than just a single number.
I have hated the Trump administration’s handling of this. The whining, the grandstanding, the chaos, the deflecting of blame, the wild, unhinged press conferences. But every time the media trumpets those total numbers as a sign of how inept the US response has been, it feels tricky to me. But my hunch is usually that I’m not getting something, so I’m looking for some way that total figures can act as an indicator of effectiveness of countermeasures.
Yeah, but think this through. CV19 is an infection; you catch by coming in contact withe people who have it. So the chances of your catching it are proportional to the number of people in your community who have it; the more cases of CV19 there are in you community, the more likely you are to come in contact with one.
The chances of your contracting CV19 are not affected at all by the number of people who come in contact with who don’t have it. So the ratio of infected people to total people is not that significant, if we are trying to assess your risk of contracting CV19. The absolute number of infected people within the community with which you have contact is the key figure.
On a per-room basis, a raging inferno that is currently engulfing ten apartments in a 500-unit apartment is less severe than a little shack that is already completely in flames. But nobody would say that a per-room accounting of the fire damage is the only way to make decisions, especially while the fire is burning. After the fire is out, the fact that most of the apartment building is standing (assuming the unburned apartments aren’t just fuel for the later stages of the fire) might be very relevant to the owners’ ability to finance a renovation of the burned areas, but in the moment, the fire is just a huge fire.
The pandemic can be expected to behave quite differently for small countries, where it can rampage through in just a few weeks, compared to larger ones. So one way to reconcile the two views is to just compare the US to comparable sized countries - say over 100 million.
If you do that, the US is ahead on both metrics. Brazil will probably come take your crown at some point though…
Here’s a list showing the data as of June 16, 2020. The US is just about halfway down the page with per capita deaths at 354 deaths per million, coming in at number 7. Not so bad, until you realizr that there are 146 entries in total, so there are actually 139 countries with lower per capita death rates than the US. We’re not the worst is kind of an uninspiring slogan.
Why do you think the per capita death rate puts the United States in a better position? Because it looks embarrassingly bad in either absolute or per capita numbers.
This is true but there will never be a time when we know that number. All we can do is look at the number of deaths and the rate at which people are dying.