What Nations Are Worst Hit By Corona Virus?

From the New York Post and Statista, and obviously subject to change as the pandemic ebbs (hopefully) and some places, and waxes (probably) in others.

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These data are worth seeing because the Trump-hating leftists want to blame COVID deaths on Trump. So of course they report that the US has the largest absolute number of deaths.

But that’s not relevant. Larger countries are going to have more cases, even if the probability of any random person getting the virus is the same. It’s cold comfort that fewer of your countrymen are getting the disease than Americans if more of the people you know are getting it. And if you have a greater chance of getting it.

So if Trump somehow could have reacted earlier and done something to reduce the death count, why didn’t leaders of these European nations act earlier and do something to reduce their death count?

The answer, of course, is that this is all Monday morning quarterbacking, and it took a while for politicians — Democrat and Republican, American and European — to realize the severity of what their countries faced.

These countries are all advanced industrial democracies, so one might ask about less developed nations. The simple answer is that the virus has spread in places with high population density, and places where there is a lot of travel with the outside world. That’s why New York was hit so early and so hard. It’s also why states in the northern Great Plains have been hit less hard.

And, of course, outside the politicized world of Trump hatred — and Trump support — the key decisions have been made by governors and mayors who imposed lock-downs, closed businesses, imposed rules on social distancing, and so on.

Whether those rules have been too strict in some cases — or indeed whether America is opening up too soon — will be a source of continual debate.