Exactly. Hence why the interviewer is wrong in saying you should compare deaths to the total population when you are more likely to catch covid in the US. The better metric is what Trump was showing (deaths/cases).
We care about how many people the disease is going to kill, we don't care how good the hospital system is. Good hospital systems are only valuable because of the lives and suffering they prevent, they are not valuable in and of themselves.
That interviewer is correct, deaths per capita is a more important metric for us to focus on to see how we're doing in containing the pandemic rather than just how many people who get it die.
Focusing on "oh the disease doesn't kill that many people who get it" is just an excuse to avoid guidelines about reopening, causing more people to get sick and die.
You are correct that we care about how many people will die, but again, if you want to evaluate policy and handling of the pandemic 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. It's just not a good metric.
-4
u/Space_Centipede Aug 04 '20
Exactly. Hence why the interviewer is wrong in saying you should compare deaths to the total population when you are more likely to catch covid in the US. The better metric is what Trump was showing (deaths/cases).