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US was delayed with the onset compared to Europe and the rest of the world. This is not some competition that lowest number of cases wins. If anything else, you

US was delayed with the onset compared to Europe and the rest of the world. This is not some competition that lowest number of cases wins. If anything else, you need to account for cases/capita. Furthermore, India, a country of 1 billion+ citizens has less than 1000 cases. Why? Because they haven't got enough testing capacity. Please stop this ranking nonsense. It is not helping in anyway. If we want to assess how effective each country will fare - look no further than totalitarian and authoritarian states. Also, wait for all of this to be over with and then we can assess who did better and who did worse. Amidst the crisis, I am frankly concerned about comments such as this. Ranking by cases/capita (per 1M) 1. Iceland: 978 2. Switzerland: 864 3. Spain: 612 4. Norway: 417 5. Austria: 396 6. Germany: 297 7. Belgium: 293 8. Iran: 258 9. France: 245 10. Netherlands: 245 11. Denmark: 241 12. Sweden: 191 13. Ireland: 183 14. S Korea: 174 15. Portugal: 157 16. USA: 98 Ignoring smaller countries such as Estonia, Vatican City, etc Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ Even the aforementioned ranking is useless because the onset is staggered. It is like taking a slice of a timeseries data in the middle of highest rates of changes and saying "Here! Look. We have some definitive answers." I am in no way opposed to spreading the message to folks in deep south states who are largely ignoring this crisis. But using misleading data to alarm them is not the right way to go about this. The press should be doing their job of communicating what exactly is going on in hospitals, pressuring leaders of the states to consider the warnings, and generally taking an objective, scientific approach in informing the public.

Taek 7y ago
These rankings are important because it helps us get a feel for what type of quarantine action is getting the virus under control. Any country with sufficient testing that's managed to bring the growth rate below exponential is worth an enormous amount of attention, because we seem to have many countries who have taken action yet failed to stop exponential growth.
- systemvoltage 7y ago
  Then use cases/capita. US has 330 million people and comparing it with #2 spot (Italy with 60 million) is completely insane, not to mention that the worse is yet to come to US. I am all for taking a critical look at American systems and their effectiveness of the response, but the ranking by the case numbers is naive, misleading and unproductive.
  - codeulike 7y ago
    Every country starts with (let's say) 1 imported case. From there, it grows. Cases/capita doesn't really mean anything until you get into the millions of cases and start thinking about what the upper bound might be. And so ranking countries by size of outbreak seems reasonable to me.
    - systemvoltage 7y ago
      I edited my comment with some data. The onset is staggered, the entire ranking thing is useless until the pandemic is over. It is simply a tracker, not an objective measure of the efficacy or the effectiveness of the measures each country is taking. It is too soon.
      - codeulike 7y ago
        I've seen plenty of graphs where people plot the epidemics correcting for start date in each country, that seems pretty useful. Edit: Here you go, here's one corrected for day of 100th case. https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1241149458089418752 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1241149458089418752
        systemvoltage 7y ago
        This is nice but still has major confounding effects that could completely change the story: - Amount of testing - Sampling process of testing - i.e. Policies that govern whether someone should be tested or not. Each country has their own policy. - Demographics, especially age - Still shows total cases, should be cases/capita - Some effects of weather/humidity
- klipt 7y ago
  > we seem to have many countries who have taken action yet failed to stop exponential growth Remember the virus has an incubation period of around 2 weeks. China's numbers appeared to be increasing exponentially for 2 weeks after the lockdown, but those were mostly people infected before the lockdown.
jacquesm 7y ago
Be concerned all you want, but look at it this way: without the most populous nations (for instance, the USA) at the top of a list like this politicians can downplay the seriousness of the threat. HN has a small army of people who do nothing else than trying to make it seem like this is 'just a flu', or something slightly worse. All of that taken together translates into people simply ignoring the danger and continuing their life making things much worse in the long run. Viruses don't have legs, they need people to transport them. And as long as we're willing it gets spread around and some people will die. If rankings like these send the message loud and clear that this also concerns you then I'm all for the rankings, even if they are a bs statistic without taking into account the total population size. People find it much easier to relate to 5000 people dead than they do to 2000 people per million infected.
- systemvoltage 7y ago
  Agreed that we need to spread the message far and wide. Just slamming down on people that are doing their best to cope with this situation isn't very productive, if not discouraging and harmful. In these times, Solidarity is needed. Just the way we support Italian crisis, we need to do the same to the US and the rest of the countries. Slam governments, take it up on the streets to address issues after this pandemic is over.
- adventured 7y ago
  > without the most populous nations (for instance, the USA) at the top of a list like this politicians can downplay the seriousness of the threat That doesn't make any sense. First, it's not desirable in any way for the US to be near the top of that list. That's a per capita list (for obvious reasons it's better for small nations to dominate that list) and the US has a spread out and very low population density compared to most nations in eg Europe. Having a high population nation doesn't inherently correlate to being near the top of the per capita infection list. Population density is not your friend when it comes to a highly infectious virus spreading in the population. Countries in Europe vs the US on population density: The Netherlands 12x, Belgium 11x, UK 9x, Germany 7x, Switzerland 6x, Italy 6x, France 4x, Poland 4x, Spain 3x. The US also has no primate cities, whereas Europe has ~25 of them (hyper population concentration). Most nations in Europe have a primate city that dominates the nation in terms of population, acting as a massive potential infection supercenter. It's entirely unsurprising that smaller European nations with high population densities vs the US would have higher infection rates per capita.
eezurr 7y ago
This list is meaningless unless you factor in the geographic sizes of the countries and what percentage of the land passes some density threshold. If you split up the united states into regions, we definitely would not be 16th on the list.
ars 7y ago
You should rank in cases per test instead. Otherwise countries that simply don't test look very good.

Taek 7y ago

These rankings are important because it helps us get a feel for what type of quarantine action is getting the virus under control. Any country with sufficient testing that's managed to bring the growth rate below exponential is worth an enormous amount of attention, because we seem to have many countries who have taken action yet failed to stop exponential growth.

systemvoltage 7y ago
Then use cases/capita. US has 330 million people and comparing it with #2 spot (Italy with 60 million) is completely insane, not to mention that the worse is yet to come to US. I am all for taking a critical look at American systems and their effectiveness of the response, but the ranking by the case numbers is naive, misleading and unproductive.
- codeulike 7y ago
  Every country starts with (let's say) 1 imported case. From there, it grows. Cases/capita doesn't really mean anything until you get into the millions of cases and start thinking about what the upper bound might be. And so ranking countries by size of outbreak seems reasonable to me.
  - systemvoltage 7y ago
    I edited my comment with some data. The onset is staggered, the entire ranking thing is useless until the pandemic is over. It is simply a tracker, not an objective measure of the efficacy or the effectiveness of the measures each country is taking. It is too soon.
    - codeulike 7y ago
      I've seen plenty of graphs where people plot the epidemics correcting for start date in each country, that seems pretty useful. Edit: Here you go, here's one corrected for day of 100th case. https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1241149458089418752 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1241149458089418752
      - systemvoltage 7y ago
        This is nice but still has major confounding effects that could completely change the story: - Amount of testing - Sampling process of testing - i.e. Policies that govern whether someone should be tested or not. Each country has their own policy. - Demographics, especially age - Still shows total cases, should be cases/capita - Some effects of weather/humidity
klipt 7y ago
> we seem to have many countries who have taken action yet failed to stop exponential growth Remember the virus has an incubation period of around 2 weeks. China's numbers appeared to be increasing exponentially for 2 weeks after the lockdown, but those were mostly people infected before the lockdown.

jacquesm 7y ago

Be concerned all you want, but look at it this way: without the most populous nations (for instance, the USA) at the top of a list like this politicians can downplay the seriousness of the threat. HN has a small army of people who do nothing else than trying to make it seem like this is 'just a flu', or something slightly worse. All of that taken together translates into people simply ignoring the danger and continuing their life making things much worse in the long run. Viruses don't have legs, they need people to transport them. And as long as we're willing it gets spread around and some people will die. If rankings like these send the message loud and clear that this also concerns you then I'm all for the rankings, even if they are a bs statistic without taking into account the total population size. People find it much easier to relate to 5000 people dead than they do to 2000 people per million infected.

systemvoltage 7y ago
Agreed that we need to spread the message far and wide. Just slamming down on people that are doing their best to cope with this situation isn't very productive, if not discouraging and harmful. In these times, Solidarity is needed. Just the way we support Italian crisis, we need to do the same to the US and the rest of the countries. Slam governments, take it up on the streets to address issues after this pandemic is over.
adventured 7y ago
> without the most populous nations (for instance, the USA) at the top of a list like this politicians can downplay the seriousness of the threat That doesn't make any sense. First, it's not desirable in any way for the US to be near the top of that list. That's a per capita list (for obvious reasons it's better for small nations to dominate that list) and the US has a spread out and very low population density compared to most nations in eg Europe. Having a high population nation doesn't inherently correlate to being near the top of the per capita infection list. Population density is not your friend when it comes to a highly infectious virus spreading in the population. Countries in Europe vs the US on population density: The Netherlands 12x, Belgium 11x, UK 9x, Germany 7x, Switzerland 6x, Italy 6x, France 4x, Poland 4x, Spain 3x. The US also has no primate cities, whereas Europe has ~25 of them (hyper population concentration). Most nations in Europe have a primate city that dominates the nation in terms of population, acting as a massive potential infection supercenter. It's entirely unsurprising that smaller European nations with high population densities vs the US would have higher infection rates per capita.

eezurr 7y ago

This list is meaningless unless you factor in the geographic sizes of the countries and what percentage of the land passes some density threshold. If you split up the united states into regions, we definitely would not be 16th on the list.

ars 7y ago

You should rank in cases per test instead. Otherwise countries that simply don't test look very good.