Always Adjust COVID-19 Deaths for Population

This chart shows the total number of people who died in 2018 in nine different developed countries:

Yikes! People are dying like flies in the United States. What’s going on? Obesity? Lung cancer? Deaths of despair?

Of course not. We have a lot of deaths because we have a large population. Here’s the death toll per million:

As it happens, the US is a little below average in deaths per capita. This is probably because our population is a little younger than the other countries, but in any case, the differences aren’t huge.

Nobody in their right mind would present the top chart as evidence of anything much. It’s obviously meaningless thanks to the large range of populations. If you want to study death rates, you need to look at deaths per capita. The same thing applies to deaths from COVID-19:

Our death total of 90,000 sounds bad, but it’s mostly because we’re a big country. If you look at COVID-19 deaths per capita, as you should, we’re about average among developed Western countries.

This might not always be true, of course. If other countries have the virus under control while we see a resurgence next month, then our death rate per capita could become one of the highest. But it isn’t yet.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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