I keep hearing things like "South Korea's response was great", "Germany's response was great", "Sweden's lack of response will lead to a devastating failure", "Donald Trump is responsible for many more deaths than the US should have seen", and I decided I wanted to evaluate performances objectively because theres a lot more to it than just looking at raw case numbers.

We should be able to evaluate overall response by a country by looking at other health indicators and seeing how that country is performing relative to typical public health indicators. In the context of COVID-19, I am choosing to look at the main COVID-19 risk factors. COVID-19 pummels through at-risk populations and barely kills people who do not have any risk factors.

Expectation:

Countries that typically perform well in health metrics for the risk factors should be expected to have lower COVID-19 death rates and conversely, countries that typically perform poorly in metrics for the risk factors should be expected to have higher death rates. Discrepancies between expected death rate rankings and actual death rate rankings could be attributed to differences in that countries response. Example, a country that has higher risk factors but lower death rates has responded well and a country with lower risk factors but higher death rates has responded poorly.

Method:

I will be using 10 notable, western countries and ranking them all 1-10 for every metric. I will then compare those rankings to death rate rankings to find out which countries are overperforming and which countries are underperforming. I will return with updated death rates every couple of months so let me know if theres data or countries you would like to see added. Cases will be ignored since cases can go undetected due to differences in testing and the fact that healthy people go undetected. Feel free to add any country you are interested in. I only chose major countries based on my interests and making this quick.

USA
UK
South Korea
Japan
Italy
Spain
France
Germany
Netherlands
Sweden

Risk factors for COVID-19 death
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/groups-at-higher-risk.html
Lung disease
Asthma
Heart disease
Obesity
Diabetes
Kidney Disease
Liver Disease
Cancer

I don't have time to do all of this so will do it piece-meal. If someone else wants to do the other risk factors thanks but I will start with "cancer", heart disease and diabetes because they are leading causes of death. I have thought about how these cases far outnumber these other risk factors in every country and there is actually a lot of overlap since diabetes is a risk factor for a lot of the other risk factors.

Risk factor Rankings:

Diabetes
1. USA
2. Germany
3. Spain
4. South Korea
5. Japan
6. Netherlands
7. Italy
8. France
9. Sweden
10. UK
https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SH.STA.DIAB.ZS/rankings

Cancer
1. USA
2. France
3. Netherlands
4. UK
5. South Korea
6. Germany
7. Sweden
8. Italy
9. Spain
10. Japan
https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer-frequency-country

Heart disease
1. USA
2. Germany
3. Sweden
4. Italy
5. UK
6. Netherlands
7. Spain
8. France *
9. Japan *
10. South Korea *
*lowest in the world
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/coronary-heart-disease/by-country/

Countries by average ranking of 3 risk factors

1. USA 1.0
2. Germany 3.3
3. Netherlands 5.0
4. France 6.0
5. UK 6.3
6. Italy 6.3
7. South Korea 6.3
8. Spain 6.3
9. Sweden 6.3
10. Japan 8.0

To be continued...:

With that all out there, You would expect the country with the highest rate of all three major risk factors (USA) to be most affected and the country with the lowest average rate of risk factors (Japan) to be least affected. Obviously, the most difficult part of this entire thing will be how to measure how a country is “affected”. Deaths per “at risk” may be the best but deaths per capita will be the easiest.

Some other things worth pointing out is that half of these countries came out with the same average which would mean those countries are relatively more comparable to each other than a healthier population like Japan or an extremely unhealthy population like the USA

[Edited on April 12, 2020 at 4:48 PM. Reason : k]

4/12/2020 4:47:24 PM

4/12/2020 4:50:26 PM

lol y u posting this on TWW

4/12/2020 5:07:22 PM

This is fine but it’s pointless to do until much, much later when we have scientific estimates as to fatalities.

Again, in America H1N1 had ~2500 fatalities reported at the time but the adjusted estimates were, what, 17,000? You cant just use live incoming data to do any sort of comparison.

4/12/2020 6:01:59 PM

4/12/2020 6:29:55 PM

We aren't trying to make this scientific. Actual studies will come out in due time and this is being done to aid data-based discussions in the mean time. We will also be updating with the new numbers every several weeks.

Quote :

"Again, in America H1N1 had ~2500 fatalities reported at the time but the adjusted estimates were, what, 17,000? You cant just use live incoming data to do any sort of comparison."

1. Theres no reason to believe discrepancies between estimates and final numbers will be significantly different across countries. I'm not saying they won't because they might. I'm just saying theres no reason to believe they will. If you have one, share it.

2. When someone dies of a flu in flu season its easy to attribute that death to the wrong flu. This isn't a flu.

3. 17,000 is a small fraction of annual flu deaths so its easier for the bulk of those deaths to hide amongst season flu deaths. COVID-19 is entirely different even if we only look at the sheer number of deaths. Those errors just aren't going to happen at this scale. If there are 60,000 deaths, its much less likely that a substantial addition to that are hidden deaths. For the same thing to happen with this, it would mean 420,000 extra people die but no one notices it until they do the research. Its not going to happen.

14,500 H1N1 deaths were hiding amongst 80,000 seasonal flu deaths. These deaths wouldn't have anywhere to hide.

4/13/2020 8:59:57 AM

Quote :

"I decided I wanted to evaluate performances objectively because theres a lot more to it than just looking at raw case numbers. defend donald trump no matter what"

fixed it

4/13/2020 9:05:52 AM

Quote :

"1. USA#1 1.0"

Holy shit man, that's three ones. One for its position on the list, one for it being #1, and one for its score.

That's all that matters. Murrca #1!

[Edited on April 13, 2020 at 9:43 AM. Reason : ]

4/13/2020 9:43:29 AM

Quote :

"2. When someone dies of a flu in flu season its easy to attribute that death to the wrong flu. This isn't a flu."

But a COVID-19 death could still be misattributed to the flu. Were you trying to make a point?

Quote :

" For the same thing to happen with this, it would mean 420,000 extra people die but no one notices it until they do the research."

No, it would not mean that you fucking moron. It would mean, for example, that people died of non-COVID-19 related pneumonia because they lacked adequate health care due to the fact that hospitals were overburdened with COVID-19 patients. Such a death is directly attributable to the chaos of the pandemic.

4/13/2020 10:21:32 AM

4/14/2020 12:49:51 AM

FYI Birx was just pointing out mortality figures by country as per 100,000 people

4/18/2020 6:19:59 PM