Opinion | How Many Lives Would a More Normal President Have Saved? - The New York Times - 0 views
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my colleague David Leonhardt suggested one possible answer in a recent edition of his Morning newsletter. Right now, he noted, “the U.S. accounts for 4 percent of the world’s population, and for 22 percent of confirmed Covid-19 deaths.” But suppose that “the United States had done merely an average job of fighting the coronavirus,” meaning that our country “accounted for the same share of virus deaths as it did global population.” How many Americans would still be alive? “The answer: about 145,000” — which is to say, the large majority of the roughly 185,000 Americans reported to have died.
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it probably makes more sense to compare the U.S. death toll to similarly positioned and sized countries — meaning the biggest countries in Western Europe and our major neighbors in the Americas — than to compare us to a global average. And when you compare deaths as a share of population within that group of peer countries, the U.S. starts to look more mediocre and less uniquely catastrophic.
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Of the five most populous countries in Western Europe, only Germany has been a great success, with less than one-fifth our coronavirus death rate. Three of the remaining five, Spain and Italy and the United Kingdom, have higher death rates than the U.S., and the fourth, France, isn’t that far below
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