The US Government's Covid-19 Inept Response & Secrecy is Fueling the Chaos
Kal Deutsch
Managing Partner & Startup Advisor, Silicon Valley in Your Pocket & Batchery Pragmatic AI | Startup Accelerator & Studio | Innovation Programs | Keynote Speaker
Even when it comes to Covid-19, a data guy is going to want to look at the data. I have been watching closely the mortality rate of the virus, not only by age but also by trends by country. One of the major shortcomings of the data out there is that the "denominator" in that calculation is the number of tests administered. When you do not fully embrace testing to try and minimize the perceived spread of the disease, you will likely also inflate the death rate. Additionally, it has become clear that those countries with a strong forceful pandemic response plan have succeeded in curbing the death rate. The US fails on both fronts.
I compared the populations, Covid-19 testing volume and death rates for the US and four other developed countries: Italy, Japan, South Korea and the UK. By a massive margin, the US lags in per-capita testing. With a measly 8,554 test administered so far, the testing rate is only 26.1 tests per million Americans.
In contrast, South Korea, a country with a population of 51.5 million, has already administered over 210,000 tests, which works out to 4,081 tests per one million residents, 156 times better per-capita than the US.
Similarly, Japan’s per-capita testing rate of 167 per one million people is 6.4 times better than that of the US. The UK’s 395 tests per one million people is 15 times better and Italy’s 1004 tests per one million people is 38.4 times better.
Within this group, the US also has the worst mortality rate at 5.9%. South Korea leads the with a 0.6% mortality rate. Japan and the UK follow with 1.5% and 1.2% respectively.
And how about that UK socialized medicine having a mortality rate almost five times better than that of the US?
Like I previously said, the extensiveness of the testing certainly helps to report a more accurate number, but there is also something to be said about the level of preparation, both in terms of population education and swift actions of their pandemic response team.
Sadly, the Trump administration fired their pandemic response team back in 2018. Even though Trump claims to hire the best people, those positions are still unfilled.