
US now nation with most coronavirus cases - doener
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52056586
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standardUser
Should say "most confirmed" cases since the actual number of infections is
completely unknown. But given the minimal testing in the US, and the failure
of many state governments to suppress the transmission rate, it's hard to
imagine another nation surpassing the number of US cases.

~~~
solean
It's really not that hard to imagine China having more cases...

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mbrubeck
The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong's newspaper of record) reports that
China excluded 43,000 confirmed-but-asymptomatic cases from its official
statistics, and kept the true number classified:

[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076323/thir...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076323/third-
coronavirus-cases-may-be-silent-carriers-classified)

This would mean that the true number of confirmed cases in China is more than
50% higher than the official number.

~~~
blackrock
Well, if your statement is correct, then this actually lowers their death
rate, the CFR (Case Fatality Ratio).

They reported 81,285 cases. So, 81,285 + 43,000 = 124,285 cases.

And 3287 deaths. So, that’s a 2.64% death rate.

At these numbers, and with the virus now worldwide, I think China’s numbers
are now irrelevant. It’s better to begin focusing our energies on mitigation
and containment.

~~~
yread
Estimating CFR is difficult, but it's probably still lower than that

[https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1243373051351359488](https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1243373051351359488)

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jsyedidia
One should of course normalize by population. The USA has a population of 327
million. Eight nations in Western Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland,
Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany) which are the core of the EU, have
a population of 303 million. The US has 82,612 cases today according to
worldometers.info. Those eight nations in Western Europe have a total of
289,767 cases today, which is about 3.78 times the US rate on a per capita
basis.

~~~
standardUser
The testing rate to date in Spain is about 2x that of the US per capita. In
Italy it is closer to 4x. That, plus the complete failure of the US to
suppress transmission rates throughout huge parts of the population, must be
taken in to account.

~~~
leereeves
Are you using the latest numbers? More tests are being done every day now in
the US than had been done total about a week ago, and we're up to 520,000
tests.

[https://twitter.com/COVID19Tracking/status/12432908485082603...](https://twitter.com/COVID19Tracking/status/1243290848508260352?s=20)

~~~
standardUser
Yes, for about 3-4 days the US has had a test are that is not dramatically
behind other developed nations.

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seemslegit
Not per-population it isn't, not even close in fact - far bellow Italy,Spain
and even considerably bellow Germany and France.

Per-population mortality rate is also closely tracking Germany rather than
Italy on Spain, beats UK by being less than half of theirs.

~~~
k__
Germany has a pretty low death count, especially for being the most populous
EU country.

~~~
seemslegit
Yes, and adjusted for population the US is doing only slightly worse

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xienze
Exactly, people can argue endlessly about who has the most cases and what it
means, but at the end of the day it’s the deaths per capita that matters. And
the US is very low in that regard.

~~~
seemslegit
For now though, the end result will be determined by how ICU capacity is
managed.

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2019-nCoV
Cases are only skyrocketing inline with testing. You can see how incompetent
most nations have been [1]. The handful of countries that have exceeded US
testing figures all have some of the lowest CFRs:

Australia — 0.46%

Germany — 0.6%

Russia — 0.13%

South Korea — 1.41%

US — 1.43%

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/covid-
testing](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing)

~~~
seemslegit
More aggressive testing _explicitly_ lowers CFR, as the harder cases that will
eventually die are confirmed under both strict and aggressive testing policies
but the light cases are only confirmed by more expansive testing.

~~~
2019-nCoV
Exactly my point. Rising confirmed cases is mostly just a proxy for test
penetration.

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seanalltogether
The death rate is worrying for the US right now because it's currently
accelerating, not decelerating like many other countries that are in full
lockdown. I guess we'll have to give it a few more days to validate, but they
could actually cross the line into deaths doubling every 3 days.

[https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest](https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest)

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downerending
Since a lot of the world's population is in places where testing is very
limited or nonexistent, this distinction might not mean very much.

Probably more useful is to watch the death count. Even there, though, many
will not necessarily be correctly attributed to the virus, given that hotspots
can be overwhelmed and politics in general.

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doitLP
What blatant fear-mongering clickbait.

That may be a marginally interesting data point, but it’s meaningless without
saying the number by population.

“Global epicentre of pandemic”? C’mon.

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rambojazz
Not really a fair comparison. Should rather compare to the EU, which has
almost 300K cases now.

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dustingetz
Lets say China has 81 million infections. That's 3.3 doubling periods away, or
17 days

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blackrock
Somehow, this is one area, that we don’t want to be #1 in.

