Covid-19 update (see Decisions, Mistakes, Regrets ... May 3, 2020)
This data is from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data, then download the complete data in xlsx or csv. This is a huge database of Covid-19 statistics by country and date.
The second and third columns here are deaths per million people for May 1, 2020 and 2021. That is well after the pandemic had started.
India 1 154
Brazil 30 1912
Germany 80 993
Canada 116 642
United States 206 1742
France 360 1539
United Kingdom 404 1882
Spain 525 1673
India 1 154
Canada 116 642
Germany 80 993
France 360 1539
Spain 525 1673
United States 206 1742
United Kingdom 404 1882
Brazil 30 1912
India is currently in crisis, so expect their deaths to rise.
So how did the US do? 3x the death rate of Canada, 2x the death rate of Germany. Not too different from France, Spain, United Kingdom.
The US did poorly at getting masks started. It did great at getting a vaccine going (despite expert predictions otherwise - whenever experts are on television, they should have their past prediction accuracy displayed prominently - of course that would put them all out of the job). The roll out of the vaccines went as smoothly as I would expect. I don't understand the lack of acceptance of the vaccines - the near and long term effects of Covid-19 can be truly nasty. The side effects of the vaccines are relatively minor. The long term effects of the vaccines are unknown, but it is unlikely to me to be worse than the disease.
Here is an interesting graph. Cumulative Covid-19 vaccines given over time. Hard to look at the graph and say where leadership changed. Looks just like I would expect a ramp up to look, except that it starts falling off starting at 40%.
I suspect that without the vaccines, we would be in deep trouble right now. (And similarly, I suspect that without free, unlimited, clean energy, i.e. fusion reactors, there is no way that we will reduce carbon emissions significantly.)
So, it is what it is. Maybe we can learn from our mistakes. Except that we don't agree on what our mistakes were.
I got vaccinated at the University of Kentucky vaccination center. (To my knowledge, I never caught the disease.) Excellent organization, handles 3000 shots per day. Thank you UK and the many volunteers.
