While Republican enablers and, of course, Trump himself are attempting to downplay how poorly they have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s worth remembering that South Korea, which had their first known case the same day as we did, has done a much better job containing the damage. As I noted, South Korea is the benchmark for how the U.S. should be doing. So this will be the start of a somewhat regular comparison between the U.S. and South Korea, with South Korean data adjusted for population size.
As of 6 am, April 16 (data from here):
| S. Korea deaths | Adjusted for popl. S. Korea deaths | U.S. deaths | S. Korea cases | Adjusted S. Korea cases | U.S. cases | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 208 | 1,352 | 16,686 | 10,450 | 67,925 | 466,299 | 10-APR-2020:1 |
| 214 | 1,391 | 22,020 | 10,512 | 68,328 | 555,313 | 12-APR-2020:3 |
| 229 | 1,489 | 30,095 | 10,613 | 68,985 | 639,664 | 16-APR-2020:7 |
U.S,. does better with deaths and cases adjusted by area since the U.S. is 98x larger than South Korea. SK area adjusted deaths: 20,142. SK area adjusted cases: 1,025,526. Both are for April 10. I don’t think geographic area has a lot to do with it other than increasing cost of response and maybe logistics and coordination of response but it is something to think about.