What Yardstick Are You Using?

In his Washington Post column Fareed Zakharia chides the United States for its ineffective response to COVID-19:

We can track the speed of the outbreak since January, by which time the virus had spread from China to other countries. In South Korea, after an initial spike, the number of new cases has slowed. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan — despite lots of travelers from China — have kept numbers low from the beginning. In the United States, however, we are seeing accelerating increases.

What did the successful countries do that seems to have worked? They began testing early and often. They coupled these tests with careful quarantines of those infected and tracking of where they had been, to better predict where the next outbreaks might occur. The public health systems had surge capacity because funding had been adequate. And authorities largely communicated simple, clear and consistent messages to the public.

I honestly have no idea what he’s talking about. The number of cases per million population in South Korea is 155.6. The number of cases per million in the U. S. is 5.7. If we had been as successful as South Korea, more than 30,000 Americans would have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and 150 people would have died. That’s about four times as many as have actually died. The situation is only a little better in Singapore and Hong Kong. They are not success stories except, possibly, in one metric which is the number of new cases diagnosed.

I repeat what I’ve written at least twice already today. In NO country has the number of cases stopped increasing. I agree that we should determine why the number of cases in South Korea isn’t growing as fast as here. Maybe it’s testing. Maybe it’s something else. I don’t honestly know.

IMO the real example we should consider is Taiwan. Why is the number of diagnosed case per million population so low there?