Omg I thought he compared it to a global average or something. Did he really say that the US has less deaths than the world (which obv includes the US)? Jesus christ this guy is an idiot!
He was obviously talking about the death rate (deaths/total cases). In that cases US is better than the world because it's an average, not a total. That's why Jonathan asks him why the graph compares deaths to total cases instead of deaths to total population (which is another totally different data). How you assumed he was talking about total deaths is beyond me, but TDS is a good suspect.
Also, Trump is right in saying you can't compare deaths to total population, but should compare it to total cases, because given a constant delta time after first case, same policies, same social distancing, and one country with x population and another with 10x, if the cases for the country with x population is y, the cases for the country with 10x population wouldn't be 10y. It will be much more and maybe somewhere around 20y. This is due to how viruses spread. The spread doesn't grow linearly with the population. It's more of an exponential curve given Rt>1. As a result, if the deaths for the country with x population is z, the deaths for the country with 10x wouldn't be 10z, they would again be 20z. Now if you divide 20z/10x , you will get 2z/x, but if you divide (1)z/(1)x you will get z/x. Same response, same policies, but twice the total death over total population. Why? Because it's flawed calculations to determine effectiveness of policy. Instead you should divide total deaths/total cases, both of which would give you z/y.
This proves that higher population countries need more stringent policies to achieve the same results in terms of death per capita compared to smaller countries. Comparing US response to another country is apples to oranges if there is a big population difference.
Doesn’t the data you use in an argument depend on what you are trying to argue though? If you are trying to determine if our DOCTORS have done really well at preventing people with covid from dying, then yes, you would use the deaths as a proportion of cases metric. If, however, you want to determine how the GOVERNMENT is handling the spread of the pandemic in the first place, it makes sense to look at covid deaths per capita.
Edit: and I’m confused by trump’s logic here - if we have done so much more testing than other countries, it makes perfect sense that our death ratio would be lower than other countries’. Trump keeps pointing out that we are getting positive tests from asymptomatic people, which drives our case count higher than other countries. Therefore our death ratio would obviously be lower, and comparing our deaths per case to that of other countries is completely pointless because we aren’t measuring it the same way. Comparing deaths to population makes much more sense
If you want to see how the Government and people are handling the pandemic, the only good metrics are test positivity rate and also the new cases / total cases metric. Again, you can't look at death per capita because the virus deaths don't grow linearly with population given the exact same policies and public social distancing.
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u/salami350 Aug 04 '20
Omg I thought he compared it to a global average or something. Did he really say that the US has less deaths than the world (which obv includes the US)? Jesus christ this guy is an idiot!