by OB1_kenobi
So if you’re like me and you spend a bit of time on reddit, you’ll notice a few things.
- United States Coronavirus: 142,746 Cases and 2,489 Deaths …
- Plenty of people have posted links claiming the US now has more cases than any other nation in the world… all Trump’s fault of course.
But how can this be so?
China got hit first and harder than anyone else. The US has had the advantage of advance warning. How is it possible that America now has more cases then China (with 5x the population)?
Answer is simple. They don’t.
Internet says…
Search Results Web results
China Coronavirus: 81,470 Cases and 3,304 Deaths …
To put it mildly, this is bullshit. Most nations have been honest in reporting their own CV19 situation. They can’t test everyone and there appears to be a majority of asymptomatic cases that will never be known. But you can combine the numbers to get an average infection rate as a % of the total population.
Epidemics don’t distinguish between nationality and they progress according to factors based on biology and time.
So lets take a few countries and check the numbers. Say US, Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Iran.
- US has 325 million population and 145,000 cases
- Italy has 100k cases and total population of 61 million.
- Spain has 80k cases, and 46 million people
- Germany, 62k cases and 83 million people
- France, 40k cases, 67 million.
- Iran, 40k cases, 81 million. (But #cases might not be too accurate)
Next step is to divide cases by population to get prevalence as a % of total population.
In order: US 0.044%, Italy 0.164%, Spain 0.174%, Germany 0.075%, France 0.06%
Now for the next step, we add these together to get an average. Doing so yields an average of 0.1034%.
Now for the last step, we take that number and apply it to China. This should give a very conservative result since China has had roughly a one month head start on everyone else.
0.1034% x 1.5 Billion (China’s population) = 1.551 Million cases. If you consider that CV19 cases have a way of doubling every couple of weeks, it’s plausible to suppose that China’s actual total might be 3 Million cases and possibly even 6 Million. Total mortality (at 1% average) would be 15,000 (low estimate) 30,000 (middle estimate) or even 60,000 (higher estimate) [Feel free to compare this number with the official figure on wikipedia that says about 80,000 cases].
If the US manages to keep the total number of cases below a million, they’ll be doing pretty good.
Also remember next time someone tries to make the US look bad, you’ll be in a much better position to judge that.
tldr; Numbers based on official stats/data from other countries suggest that the Chinese have been “less than perfectly honest” about their own corona situation.
Disclaimer: This is a guest post and it doesn’t represent the views of IWB.