Jubilee Post News & Views
Special Desk
The world is looking towards the US on what is the situation of coronavirus there and the lessons to be learned from the country. The death toll in the US became the highest in the world in early April and has risen dramatically since then.
Two days after the US recorded its first case of coronavirus, Donald Trump said the situation was “totally under control” and assured the public it was “going to be just fine”. Four months later the virus has spread across all 50 states, leaving a death toll of 100,000 from more than 1.6 million confirmed cases.
President Donald Trump initially said “50 to 60,000” people could die during the outbreak but in May he said he was hopeful the toll would be lower than 100,000. That benchmark has now been hit though and there are still about 1,000 deaths a day on average.
Rather than focus on deaths, Trump has preferred to cite the mortality rate – that is the number of people that have died relative to the country’s population – as evidence that the US has dealt with the virus more effectively than some other nations.
Belgium, with a population of 11.5 million, has seen 82 people in every 100,000 die during its coronavirus outbreak while the US, with a population of around 330 million, has seen nearly 30 people in every 100,000 die.
Come to India and you realize more people have now died with Covid-19 than China, according to latest figures. The number of deaths has increased to 4,706 – in comparison, China has confirmed 4,638. With more than 160,000 total infections, India’s cases surpassed China.
While India’s fourth stage of lockdown is close to an end, it remains unclear what to expect going forward. Some experts say the outbreak hasn’t peaked, and will do so only in June or July.
But if you look at New York – the worst-hit state in the US – the mortality rate there is close to 150 people in every 100,000, which shows that there is a lot of variation across the US.
One of the problems with comparing countries is that many of them report deaths in different ways. Belgium, for instance, includes deaths where coronavirus was suspected of being present but was never confirmed with a test. Some US states record deaths this way, but not all.
There have also been questions over whether official data from some countries can be trusted. Critics of China in particular have accused it of under-reporting the scale of its outbreak.
Another issue is that countries could be at different stages of an outbreak. In many European countries it’s clear that daily cases numbers are coming down significantly and they are past the peak. But you can’t say the same for the US at the moment.
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Several countries in Europe had outbreaks around the same time as the US and all of them have seen the number of deaths grow quickly, peak and then fall away. The US has not.
Earlier this month Trump had said, “Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country opened and we have to get it open soon.” Even if states continue to ease restrictions, it’s unclear whether the American public will be eager to return to shops and restaurants just yet. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 70% of Americans were concerned that states would reopen too quickly.
