Yeah, that's one of the other standard lines being pushed by the press to convince everyone that the US is uniquely failing. It's a very effective talking point

Yeah, that's one of the other standard lines being pushed by the press to convince everyone that the US is uniquely failing. It's a very effective talking point. The trouble is, it makes no sense to compare those two numbers because most of the world's population is in places that don't have widespread access to medical care or coronavirus testing, and we know that there have been major outbreaks in pretty much all of those areas. (For instance, antibody testing on a sample of residents suggests about half the population of Mumbai's main slums had caught Covid-19 as of a couple of months or so ago. That's quite a lot of people which really weren't captured by the official case count - and there have also been outbreaks throughout India, including more recently in rural areas, in Africa, South America, Mexico...) The other problem is that even within Europe, the really major outbreaks happened in countries which also didn't have widespread coronavirus testing at the time. For the most part they were usually only testing people who ended up being hospitalized. So the total death counts are probably reasonably accurate, but case counts are basically meaningless even for those outbreaks. (Which causes some problems when comparing the current, somewhat alarming case counts in many European countries with the initial wave.)