How badly US performs on COVID compared to rest of G20

COVID-19 Outbreak World Map per Capita (Wikipedia)Some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations that came to me while on a long bike ride today ...

Question: which G20 members have suffered a smaller/larger percentage share of global COVID deaths relative to their share of global population?

G20 encompasses 63% of world population, but it's the more economically advanced share, so we should expect the G20 as a whole to suffer less than 63% of global COVID deaths.

In truth, for now, it seems that the G20 account for roughly 4/5th of global deaths, or 80%. So, as a whole, the G20 underperforms. With all that wealth, you'd expect a share far below 63%. Of course, as the pandemic hits the world's poorer areas over time, the G20's share will drop.  Still, not a good performance.

Let's look inside the G20 to see who's outperforming their global share of world population and who is underperforming. In the latter case, that country's percentage share of COVID deaths would exceed its percentage share of global population.

NOTE: all the numbers here come from Wikipedia sites, which draw upon reputable sources. Again, these are back-of-the-envelope calculations in search of a reasonably fair assessment of government performance.

First, a list of the G20 members outperforming on COVID (defined as percentage share of global population being higher than percentage share of global COVID deaths):

• China
• Indonesia
• Japan
• South Korea
• Australia
• Saudi Arabia
• India
• Argentina.

Now the list of G20 members basically performing as expected, meaning the percentage share of global population is roughly matched by the percentage share of COVID deaths:

• Russia
• South Africa
• Turkey
• Germany
• Canada.

So, 13 of the G20 performing as expected or better - stipulating that some nations are under-reporting but unlikely to be doing so in such a way as to change their performance from positive/average to bad in any profound sense.

Now for the underperformers:

• United States
• Mexico
• Brazil
• France
• Italy
• United Kingdom
• EU as whole.

Now the underperformers ranked by severity (defined as the biggest gap in percentage shares):

1. EU: 27% COVID - 4% world pop = 23 percentage pt. gap
2. United States: 23% - 4% = 19 pt. gap
3. Brazil: 13% - 3% = 10 pt. gap
4. United Kingdom: 7% - 1% = 6 pt. gap
5. Mexico: 7% - 2% = 5 pt. gap
6. Italy: 5% - 1% = 4 pt. gap
7. France: 5% - 1% = 4 pt. gap.

If you translate that point gap into excess or preventable deaths, then it is expressed as follows:

1. EU = 156,000 excess deaths
2. United States = 126,000 excess deaths
3. Brazil = 69,000 excess deaths
4. United Kingdom = 39,000 excess deaths
5. Mexico = 32,000 excess deaths
6. Italy = 28,000 excess deaths
7. France = 23,000 excess deaths.

If we fold UK, Italy, and France into the EU, then we're talking 383,000 lives in total. 

We can debate the right adjective here: unnecessary, wrong, sacrificed, lost, etc.

I prefer to think of it as simply a rough estimate of what poor government performance - largely expressed in bad political leadership - actually costs in human lives during a disaster such as this.

COVID-19: You can go your own way ... and suffer the consequences of your arrogance

Seems pretty obvious that, to do well, you craft and execute an aggressive national testing strategy replete with large-scale tracking corps.

The United States has done neither, with the Federal Government taking a pass and declaring it all up to the presently overwhelmed (in many instances) states.

So we are losing the COVID-19 "competition," as this chart makes clear.

There is no good reason for this failure, and it seems poised to ruin any large-scale re-opening of the economy, which is very sad for all involved.

Our national economy is experiencing an extinction-level-event in terms of households, jobs, skills, business models, and even entire industries. The "mammals" will get by, but loads of "dinosaurs" will disappear. 

It did not have to be this way. We needed a strong and competent federal government for this crisis, and we did not get one.

COVID19: "Mission Accomplished" degenerates into geographic whack-a-mole

From NYT coverage.

Everything you need to know about where things stand right now.

Fair to compare NYC with entire rest of nation? When the former has accounted for roughly half the deaths so far ... yeah, sad to say.

Up to now, COVID19 has been rougher on Blue urban bastions, leaving the rural Red skeptical and prone to "magical thinking," as the story here implies.

We'll see how that changes as this pandemic grows a whole lot less fake news-y for a major swath of our nation.

COVID-19's "cone of plausibility" and how America can get it right or wrong

Obtained, via WAPO "The Daily 202," from here.

The "cone of plausibility" is a graphical representation of a range of plausible downstream scenarios expanding outward from today's current reality.  See here for a description.

What is presented here is the exhibited reality of numerous states, indicating that most, once trapped in the coronavirus dynamic, suffer a post-first-100-cases trajectory of rough doubling of cases between every 2-3 days. That's the cone.

Those who did better?  For now, they are well-run Asian democracies (Japan and ROK), where collectivism trumps individualism (at least still when in crisis), so a mixture of social self-discipline, strong governments with extensive power and reach, and a high level of trust between leaders and led.

HK and Singapore appear to fall into that category, but I never put too much stock in city-states as exemplars. The scale is just too far off. China underperforms largely because government was looking out for itself for far too long in beginning, recovering only through fairly harsh measures - all very Chinese.

The West seems clearly clustered in that 2-3-day-doubling range, with probably speed-of-response being the key differentiator. We're on the high end in US because Red America blew it off until very recently, following the lead of POTUS and Fox News. With that dynamic hopefully muted for a while as vast majority of Americans now "come to Jesus" in taking this seriously, the big question looming is, How long can we continue doing what's needed, given the economic cost?

Already the speculation rises that POTUS will feel great personal financial pressures over his suffering properties (estimated to be losing 1/2M$ per day), and, while that's true, it's also indicative of the genuine economic pain, so maybe not the worst inpulse. Still, those external economic pressures would swamp any White House, so perhaps it would have been safer to have someone in charge right now with more financial "distance" from that dynamic (i.e., a traditional president).  So now we watch Kudlow-vs-Fauci, with POTUS making comparisons to auto accident deaths, etc.

That's a natural tension in any crisis: When do we get to declare it's over?  Americans are not a patient lot. And yet, the stakes here couldn't be higher. Right now the percent of Americans who've lost someone is tiny, but that will expand dramatically over the next month, making all this EXTREMELY personal to those affected. Loved ones die all the time from forces we cannot tame, but, as this chart shows, we CAN tame this dynamic, given the right balance between economic and human cost. Done well, maybe 2020 feels like a "double-cancer" or "double-heart disease" year (i.e., COVID-19 kills about 600,000), but done poorly - and given all the "war" talk, maybe a 60% infection rate, coupled with a 1% kill rate (both entirely plausible estimates), leaves 2 million Americans dead. That would be a slightly higher social cost than WWII was (or 2m of 330m as just 1/2 of 1% of Americans dying from COVID-19 versus 400k of 131m dying in WWII - or roughly 1/3 of 1%). 

The experential data seems very clear on this: Even with a solid effort, the average country is looking at a peak-and-decline dynamic arriving in the range of 8-10 weeks after crisis onset. That is mid-to-late May for the U.S. We are getty antsy now, half-way through Week 2, so it's hard to imagine most citizens exhibiting the necessary self-discipline for another 6-8 weeks, even as the experience of other countries makes clear that is what is required if you want a semi-normal summer (hopefully) followed by a renewed battle in the fall, but one fought on far better terms.

Done right, POTUS pulls out a huge policy/leadership win even as the economic costs pile up and possibly ruin his re-election bid. George H.W. Bush did similarly with Desert Storm and the early 90s economic slowdown, but he took his fate like the real leader he was. I am far less hopeful in this current political climate.

Point of this chart SHOULD be: we know what we have to do, the only question is whether we value lives more than money. 

I know, right?  How very Bernie of a moment, but also a glimpse of our collective future. We hurtle toward Kurzweil's Singularity, reflective of our collective trajectory into the Age of Biology. Access to medical care/tech is already becoming THE human rights issue of this century, and experiences like this only accelerate those dynamics. By way of comparison, America's inevitable transformation into non-white majority status seems positively retrograde in terms of ideological stakes, even as it so clearly captures the political attention of so many citizens right now.

Per the adage about not wasting any crisis, we can hope that this pandemic alters our thinking here in America, reacquainting us with the emerging reality that this is the nature of crises in today's world (system perturbations, not fantasies of returning to strategic warfare with other great powers - much less the "grave danger" of invading immigrant hordes) and redirecting us off this racially-based identity politics and back onto issues of human rights concerning fair access to emerging health technologies and the care options they offer. With the rich and famous being treated so well (Your COVID test is in, Mr. Hanks/Mr. Gobert/Senator Paul!) while front-line healthcare workers jerry-rig protective gear, this crisis presents immense potential for another populist explosion in the upcoming election - likely to be our 8th "change election" in a row!

Here's hoping we come closer to the mark on this one.