It's All in How You Look at It

The media as is their habit is being a bit disingenuous in their claims that the U.S. is leading the world in covid-19 deaths. As a piece at PJ Media by Matt Margolis points out, it all depends on which statistics you use.

Here's Margolis:

Last month, when President Trump said the United States had done more coronavirus tests than South Korea, the media pounced on the claim and pointed out that the United States’ population is more than six times that of South Korea, and when you looked at testing per capita, the United States was still behind South Korea.

Fair enough, but now it's being widely trumpeted in the media that the United States has the unenviable distinction of leading the world in coronavirus deaths. Political attack ads are using this statistic to discredit Trump's response to the plague, but, as Margolis points out, this is bogus for two reasons.

The first is, of course, that anyone who trusts the numbers produced by the Chinese authorities is being extraordinarily naive, and the second is that the media, which insisted that we use per capita statistics when the talk was about testing, has now abandoned that measure since it evidently no longer suits their purpose.

Margolis again:

The United States does not lead the world in coronavirus cases per capita — which is the best way to compare how the pandemic is being contained in each country. For much of the pandemic, Italy has been overwhelmed by the coronavirus, but Italy has fewer cases and deaths than the United States.

The United States has nearly six times the population of Italy, and when you measure cases and deaths per capita it’s easy to see why Italy was overwhelmed and the United States is not.

Margolis features some dramatic graphs in his column, and the interested reader should check them out. What they show is that if cases and deaths are ranked per capita, the standard the media derided Trump for not using when he talked about testing, the United States is actually fourth in the world in terms of cases of infection, trailing Spain, Italy and France, and fifth in the world in terms of deaths. Spain, Italy, France and the U.K. all have more deaths per capita than does the U.S.

And these numbers don't include China which is doubtless lying about both their cases and deaths, just as they've lied about this virus from the beginning.

Moreover, Margolis' graphs show that in per capita terms we are not just behind, but we're far behind those nations with the highest morbidities. This is glum news in any case, but it would be a little more helpful if the media would be a little more honest in how they report these statistics. Of course, when the summum bonum is discrediting Trump what does a bit of dissimulation matter?

One caveat: If you check the graphs the plot line for France in the graph that shows cases per million doesn't correspond to the numbers given in the table, but the table is more likely than the graph to be accurate.