Eric Herr: Rhetoric about COVID suggests alternate realities

To The Daily Sun,

COVID-19, no matter one’s political point of view, is shaping our economy, our politics, and our lives. Unfortunately, the news, discussions, and rhetoric about COVID-19 seem to suggest that there really are alternative realities. That is hardly shocking given the state of political partisanship, the media-political alignment, and the hardened political commitment of the voting public. Bruce Jenket rightly suggests, in his letter to the Laconia Daily Sun of Sept. 16, that we all need to distinguish between rhetoric and results.

In his letter, Jenket wrote of COVID-19, “the U.S. has one of the lowest death rates of developed countries." He went on “the 'results' support that.” And on Sept. 17, Russ Wiles wrote, “COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 of population, USA=58.61, one of the lowest in the world”, citing data from Johns Hopkins.

Do the results really support that rhetoric? Let’s look at the Johns Hopkins data updated through the Sept. 18 at 3 a.m. EDT. Like Wiles, let’s focus on COVID deaths per 100,000 population. Hopkins reports data on 164 countries. Where does the U.S. rank across all countries? We are 11th highest. Only 10 countries had higher death rates than the U.S., and 153 countries had lower death rates than the U.S., and 140 of the 164 countries tracked had COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 population that were less than half the U.S. rate. The U.S. doesn’t have one of the lowest death rates per capita across the world, it has one of the highest.

Jenket referenced developed countries. So let’s look only at the 34 OECD countries, the largest, most developed countries in the geopolitical West. Among those 34 countries only 3 – Belgium, Spain, and the UK – had COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 population higher than the US. That means 30 OECD countries had lower COVID-19 death rates per 100,000 than the U.S. Did the U.S. have one of the lowest COVID-19 death rates among developed countries? No, it had one of the highest. In fact, the U.S. COVID-19 death rate per capita was 2.2 times the OECD average.

There is another interesting finding from the data. The arithmetic of deaths per capita can be parsed into two components: fatalities per COVID case and COVID cases per capita. Johns Hopkins reports the former, and the latter can be derived via simple math. Across the 164 countries tracked by Johns Hopkins, fatalities per case for the U.S. was not materially different from the average of all countries – 2.9% for all countries vs. 3.0% for the US. But, the per capita infection rate for the US was 3.9 times the average for countries. The infection rate, the spread of the disease, is the U.S.’s Achilles heel. That is our public health and social practice problem.

Does it matter? If U.S. cases per 100,000 population just achieved the 164 country average, 150,000 fewer people would have died from COVID-19 since it arrived on our shores.

Eric Herr

Hill