Comment by gf000

Comment by gf000 6 months ago

1 reply

How do you explain then the differences between countries? Of course, different measurements/demographics aside.

somenameforme 6 months ago

There's a nice visual here [1] that shows excess mortality instead of relying on COVID numbers. This helps control for different standards in measurement/demographics, to some degree. After all was said and done the difference between countries was pretty small. The US had a relatively poor outcome for COVID and ended up with excess deaths of 434 per 100k. Australia had one of the best (amongst advanced economies), and ended up with 163. There were large relative differences, but the absolute differences were small - those values are (per 100k) 99.72% the same.

And behaviors were not really predictive of outcomes. Gibraltar, for instance, was the first 'country' (they put the micro in micronation) to achieve complete vaccination coverage. The media ran tons of stories on them being a window into a post-COVID future because cases there plummeted. Then the next COVID wave hit and cases skyrocketed there, just like everywhere else. After all was said and done they ended up closer to the US than Australia with excess mortality of 300.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus