What the Media Isn't Telling You About the United States' Coronavirus Case Numbers

PJ Media ^ | March 27, 2020 | Matt Margolis

[CheshireTheCat]

...Here are the top six countries by confirmed cases (based on the case numbers from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University as of 2:30 pm ET March 27) in descending order:

USA (94,238) Italy (86,498) Spain (64,059) Germany (49,344) Iran (32,332) France (29,593)

Now, here are the top six countries by confirmed cases per million people (based on population numbers from the CIA World Fact Book) in descending order:

Italy (1386.13) Spain (1280.78) Germany (615.57) France (436.17) Iran (380.72) USA (283.30)...

[CheshireTheCat]

I thought Germany was doing so much better than us.

It will be interesting to see how numbers hold up going forward when testing is more widespread.

I would really like to see a breakdown by ethnic group.

[SkyDancer]

I haven’t believed our media for years. The Babylon Bee is more accurate.

[Robert A Cook PE]

More details from the article:
“Germany looks pretty good compared to everyone else, doesn’t it? But, let’s look at confirmed deaths per million people in descending order, to see how that changes things:

Italy (146.37)

Spain (98.65)

Iran (28.00)

France (25.03)

USA (4.32)

Germany (3.79)

Interesting indeed! Germany and the United States have significantly better coronavirus death rates per capita than Italy, Spain, Iran and France. A lot better. This is why the media avoids per capita measurements for confirmed cases, but conveniently remembered when it wanted to fact-check Trump’s testing numbers”

[Rurudyne]

Wait ... where is China?

The ChiComs lie and the media in the West drools....

[CTrent1564]

These data are 4 days old. USA now has close to 200,000 reported cases, Germany is at 76,000 as of today, Spain is at 105K, Italy 100K.

Germany slowed it down a bit because when Italy was hit early on, Germany and Merkel quickly turned from her Globalist EU/UN agenda into a Nationalist. Medical supply’s were not allowed to be shipped out of Germany and thus German Hospitals had more time to ramp up and mitigate early on, otherwise it would be where Italy and Spain are right now.

[Morpheus2009]

The fact that China expelled outside reporters makes whatever they are saying not to be taken at face value.

[CheshireTheCat]

The Chinese numbers are unreliable.

[Fungi]

Stalin welcomed a few reporters including the infamous Walter Duranty and it only made matters worse.

[brookwood]

This is a useless PJM article because it is from March 27th. It would be nice if all the people who died since March 27th could be brought back to life, but I don’t think that will happen. 87,000 cases in the US? Sorry the number is 205,000 as of 2pm 4/1.

[Stevenc131]

The actual figures as far as deaths/million population are a little old in that article, but still about the same ratio. On Monday morning 3/30 I did calculations:

Italy - 162/million
U.S. -— 6.75/million
Germany - 5.5/million

Again, not that much difference between Germany and the U.S., but you’d never know it reading the glowing media reports on Germany and the constant bashing of the U.S.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

The MSM/dems/left only care about two numbers in all of this. For the USA, high and higher. After years of my theorizing I’ve confirmed that they are all indeed short sighted. They put all of their eggs in one basket for this to continue as is to bring down President Trump. They don’t realize that this will eventually be over after numbers start dropping and the panicdemic ends.

[CheshireTheCat]

I think what the author is pointing out is that we must always keep in mind the per capita numbers and not allow the media to paint a picture of the US being so far ahead in the death counts compared to other countries.

Yes, death is a tragedy to the person who passed away and their friends and family, but lies about the death statistics are a bigger tragedy if they are allowed to take down a government.

[cuban leaf]

This is why I don’t care about the rate of infection. It only measures how many people have been tested and what percentage of them test positive. What matters is the death numbers. There is no test other than the ability to fog a mirror. it is an event that happens. It’s easy to keep track of that number vs the number of people that exist.

[DoodleBob]

I took select/major nations' confirmed case total through the end of March, divided it by that country's population and multiplied it by the US' population to put everyone on an even/US footing.

I then set each country's Day 1 to when they hit 100 cases per 100,000 people, and carried the numbers through to Day 10 (i.e., the last day for the US). The table below is sorted by the Day 10 values.

When you look at it this way, New York State is a disaster. But removing NYS from the US totals, we look more like Ireland than Spain. Even with NYS, the US is tracking well below Switzerland.

Country	Date when Cases per 100,000 >100	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5	Day 6	Day 7	Day 8	Day 9	Day 10
Ireland	3/19/20	37,533	46,023	52,896	61,050	75,807	89,553	105,388	122,571	142,921	162,731
Netherlands	3/18/20	39,564	47,434	57,787	70,045	81,148	91,674	107,376	123,886	143,707	166,394
Italy	3/8/20	40,072	49,836	55,145	67,713	67,713	95,956	114,957	134,463	152,030	171,188
Germany	3/17/20	36,466	48,560	60,350	78,188	87,504	97,983	114,461	129,942	147,027	173,086
Belgium	3/17/20	35,439	42,368	51,178	64,350	80,259	96,967	106,717	121,714	140,760	177,767
Israel	3/21/20	34,100	41,360	55,687	74,532	91,486	103,998	117,205	139,758	164,010	181,311
United States	3/22/20	33,739	43,658	53,729	65,765	83,819	101,637	121,454	140,858	161,775	188,135
US excl NYS	3/25/20	30,711	42,107	53,537	63,952	76,349	88,850	105,475	.	.	.
Spain	3/13/20	36,830	44,989	54,893	69,986	82,699	97,918	126,449	143,675	178,618	201,349
Austria	3/16/20	37,400	48,936	60,472	73,955	87,732	103,383	131,525	164,370	194,091	205,297
Portugal	3/21/20	41,181	51,476	66,275	75,991	96,356	114,019	137,311	166,331	191,811	206,160
Switzerland	3/13/20	43,617	52,042	84,247	84,247	103,395	115,955	156,049	202,730	251,785	286,211
New York	3/18/20	39,184	68,300	116,828	170,356	249,514	343,394	422,189	543,936	641,336	734,246

[JeanLM]

You are basically right but even in the death category we still have deaths from the regular flu of a few hundred a week. I doubt everyone distinguishes between the two flus the same way.

[Vermont Lt]

This is not hitting all of the US at the same time.

All of this counting is useless until next year at this time. No offense to those collecting the data...I know you mean well and you are doing a good job. But this is not a week to week fantasy football league, and none of us have accurate numbers.

[cuban leaf]

This just speaks to how I think the thing that ended up doing us in is not the virus but our response. History will not be kind to this generation.

[nwrep]

FT Analysis of Worldwide Covid-19 Stats

[the_Watchman]

Thank you for this article! I sent the following letter to my family members:

This article from PJMedia starts out that the media avoids the use of per capita numbers unless they want to bash President Trump. Then, the article shows some per capita figures which demonstrate that, at least so far, the U.S. is far from being the epicenter of the virus.

I have not been happy that Europe numbers have always been treated as individual countries and then compared to the entire U.S. The reality is that European countries are about the size of our larger states. If you aggregate Italy, Spain, Germany, and France together, then they still exceed the total cases of the U.S. and you still are talking about lower aggregated populations.

I noticed during the White House press briefing that everyone was complementary to the way the virus was being handled in New York and California. However, if New York and San Francisco were eliminated from the U.S. figures, the U.S. numbers would be even better.

Remember that up until March 14, Mayor deBlasio of New York and his medical team were telling New Yorkers to go about their daily lives as if nothing were happening. Nancy Pelosi actually toured China Town in San Francisco in order to assure her constituents that everything was OK for celebrating the Chinese New Year.

It is reminiscent of the Mayor of Florence Italy who was suggesting that his residents should hug a Chinese person in order to dispel any notion of racism.

The next two weeks will be really telling. It is going to be a rough ride, but by mid-month we should see some downturn in new cases. We may also start to see some good results from some of the medications.

[exDemMom]

It is not the deaths as a function of population that matters, it is the deaths of those who get sick that matters. This virus is a cold virus, and everyone gets colds. As long as it can be contained, the death rate as a function of population will stay low. But if it starts sweeping around like non-killer colds, the number of dead as a function of population will grow sharply.