One more post tonight partially in honor of Worldometers adding testing data, which is great; now they just need to add columns for percent growth rate in cases and deaths per 1M. In comparing countries, looking at data normalized on a per capita basis is the only way to compare apples to apples for the most part. When looking at that, the US doesn't look nearly as bad as the worst countries, like Italy and Spain or even France and several other European countries.
However, most of those countries are further along in their outbreaks and are seeing deaths per day leveling off, while our deaths per day are still climbing significantly - we had 1321 deaths yesterday, but if we stay under 2000 per day, we'll remain at less than half the per capita death rate of Italy and Spain. That's the glass half-full perspective and in that scenario one could imagine seeing 40-50K US deaths (and ~5X that many serious cases) before we're into a decline in maybe 3-4 weeks. The glass half empty view is if we do even worse, reaching Italy/Spain numbers and maybe ending up with 80-100K or more deaths before we're well into a decline.
No matter what though, as many of us have been saying since late February we look absolutely horrible against South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and a few others (and China, but I still don't trust their numbers), but South Korea is the most painful example, since we saw them have a major outbreak in late February and largely control it by early March and the playbook was obvious and fairly similar to China's without the draconian lockdown, featuring aggressive early testing, aggressive contact tracing/quarantining, and aggressive social distancing and mask wearing in public. If we had followed SK's model and ended up obtaining similar results of 3 deaths per 1M or even double that, we could have ended up with 1000-2000 deaths (although SK can't claim total victory until there is a cure/vaccine, as they could always have a major relapse, but I doubt it). And that makes me really sad and angry.
Numerous public health experts in the US knew that's what we should be pursuing, but our leadership failed at every turn, particularly on fixing the testing problem in mid-February and doing nothing to prepare our health care system for the coming onslaught (and yes, it was a bipartisan debacle 20 years in the making, but we should have started doing far more over a month ago). Instead the POTUS downplayed the coming epidemic and the Administration failed to do much beyond the travel ban on 2/2 (after 300K Chinese had traveled to the US in January). I love the technical and pharma innovations we're seeing (enabled by suspending FDA regs by the Administration), but so far we have no good treatments in place (despite claims to the contrary - if we had something great, our death rates would be lower given the numbers on HCQ); my guess is our one medical hope in the next 1-2 months is the antibody-plasma therapy that's underway with some very promising early results and maybe that could pay off soon if the promise is confirmed. It's about to get really bumpy now/soon, though...
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
