After hearing Donald Trump blather away about how great the United States has done in its battle with COVID-19—based on a completely meaningless statistic—perhaps you’d like to see how we’re really doing. Here you go:
We are the seventh worst in the world, behind only Belgium, the UK, Peru, Italy, Sweden, and Chile. At the rate we’re going, in a few weeks we’ll probably be the third worst country in the world. And that’s despite a huge and extremely competent health care system.
There was no good reason for this. Maybe we never had the self-discipline and patience to be Germany (109 deaths per million), but even moderately decent leadership could have cut our number in half and had us trending downward instead of heading back up.
Competence matters.
NOTE: For space reasons in the chart, only every third country is labeled. I also deleted tiny statelets.
UPDATE: The original chart was too confusing. It now shows every country, not every third. The downside is that the type is teensy.
