- Joined
- Mar 7, 2018
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- Lower Mainland of BC
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- Centrist
First, obviously you still avoid explaining your criteria for inclusion, regardless of your desire for dealing with "advanced economies". Canada has one of the highest GDP's per capita's (tax haven's and oil states excluded) in the world, but nothing like the size of China or the US economy. On the other hand, China's and Russia's per capita GDP mean or median does not come close to the others. If your list is based on size, then India and Brazil should be on the list, with China and Russia, not Canada. If its based on resources per person, then there are scores of European countries and several in Asia aside from Japan that are far richer than China or Russia.
Ergo, your apples and oranges list has zero "economically advanced" coherency - until you state a formal criteria for inclusion by GDP or GDP per person then its more than my opinion its crap, its a necessary conclusion.
Second, the ability to fight Covid isn't an issue; there is likely no large difference in ability to "fight" an infection that doesn't have a cure and whose major "treatment" is wearing a cloth over one's face or having a nurse tend to one's usual needs (oxygen, meals, etc.). More importantly, GDP is not so much as a variable for better resources because studies show the opposite - it's an associated variable that correlates with the disease; the higher a countries GDP the higher the case rate.
As I stated: your "list" could also have noted (were your sampling less arbitrary) that the US and France rank 10th/11th among deaths per million (Worldometer chart attached), far lower that the UK, Italy, Spain, etc. You could have also noted that the US ranks much lower in fatalities per case than most in western Europe, including Germany. In fact the US fatality rate per case is about 1/5th of that of other leading nations (see Attachment, World In Data).
I have no idea what you think your homebrew "corrections" by GDP even mean. My suggestion is that you stick to the variables widely examined and understood in the literature, not some pull it from your arse "finding".
And recovered is meaningless without knowing how a case is defined, who is tracked as a case, and how late the system is in providing resolved cases. As I demonstrated, a rate of 50 or 60 percent of "recovered" is epidemiological meaningless (e.g. the number for France).
Among the questions needing answered for EACH subject country and its method of counting:
- Are "cases" all positive tests, even for the same individual?
- Do "cases" mean anyone, with or without a doctor's supervision having a positive result on a test?
- Do "cases" include asymptomatic individuals?
- Do "cases" include symptomatic but untreated individuals?
- Do "cases" include those who see a doctor, have a positive test, and require no further treatment?
- Are "cases" defined as just "clinical cases", meaning those hospitalized and then discharged".
Without knowing whose counted, who is actually tracked, and who gets reported as "discharged" or "recovered" (a term used interchangeably but having different meanings) for each country under comparison, your spitting in the wind.
And the chances of an American picked at random having COVID, and therefore possibly dying has largely (but not always) about twice that of a Canadian. In fact, that has been true since March 15th when the infection exploded in the US NE but not so much in Canada. Within 10 days that gap opened up to 4 to 1 in infection rate...and rocketed away.
I have no idea what you think that means, other than from the outset the NE was plastered.
I give your position, which appears to be that it is totally impossible to prove anything at all about COVID-19 because we are not 100% absolutely positively certain that the statistics are 100% absolutely positively accurate and have taken absolutely 100% of all potential causative and/or ameliorative factors 100% into account with 100% precision and that means that the United States of America is doing better than any other country in the world in dealing with the so-called "COVID-19" so-called "pandemic", all the respect and consideration that it deserves.