Britain is the worst-hit country outside of the US and Brazil. But it STILL won't wear masks

[Robert59]

Walk into any busy store in England or board a train on London's cramped underground system and you will see dozens of people unmasked. And you can forget about face coverings at recently reopened pubs... that's about as likely as a free pint of beer.
This despite the UK being one of the world's worst-hit countries by coronavirus -- it stands third behind Brazil and the United States -- with almost 45,000 fatalities.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/12/health/britain-masks-intl-gbr/index.html

 

[AnnieA]

You're reading an article based on the wrong stats. I selected this table to show deaths/1M population. The US isn't first and the UK isn't second. Journalism these days apparently doesn't require even a modicum of intelligence.

 

[Warrigal]

The virus doesn't take into account the size of a population nor national boundaries. All it requires is that infected people are in contact with others to keep replicating itself. For this reason statistics on a per capita per country basis are misleading. To say that San Marino, with 42 deaths in total is a worse case than the UK is a nonsense.

I looked up some statistics yesterday and found a site that keeps updated statistics and I extracted the latest confirmed deaths by country and by continent.

Confirmed deaths as of 11 July 2020 by Country/Region

By Region
World 559,998
Europe 195,622
North America 181,489
South America 102,204
Asia 67,781
Africa 12,760
Australia 106

By Country
United States 134,097
Brazil 70,398
United Kingdom 44,650
Italy 34,938
Mexico 34,191
France 30,004
India 22,123
Iran 12,447
Peru 11,500
Russia 11,017
Belgium 9,782
Germany 9,060
Canada 8,759
Chile 6,781
Netherlands 6,127
Sweden 5,526
Turkey 5,323
Pakistan 5,123
Ecuador 4,983
Colombia 4,925
China 4,641
South Africa 3,860
Egypt 3,702
Indonesia 3,469
Iraq 2,960
Bangladesh 2,275
Saudi Arabia 2,151
Romania 1,847
Argentina 1,749
Ireland 1,744
Bolivia 1,702
Switzerland 1,685
Portugal 1,646
Poland 1,562
Philippines 1,360
Ukraine 1,345
Guatemala 1,139

Every where else has less than 1000 confirmed deaths.

The full data set is available here https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths

 

[AnnieA]

The virus doesn't take into account the size of a population nor national boundaries. All it requires is that infected people are in contact with others to keep replicating itself. For this reason statistics on a per capita per country basis are misleading. To say that San Marino, with 42 deaths in total is a worse case than the UK is a nonsense.

I looked up some statistics yesterday and found a site that keeps updated statistics and I extracted the latest confirmed deaths by country and by continent.

Confirmed deaths as of 11 July 2020 by Country/Region

By Region
World 559,998
Europe 195,622
North America 181,489
South America 102,204
Asia 67,781
Africa 12,760
Australia 106

By Country
United States 134,097
Brazil 70,398
United Kingdom 44,650
Italy 34,938
Mexico 34,191
France 30,004
India 22,123
Iran 12,447
Peru 11,500
Russia 11,017
Belgium 9,782
Germany 9,060
Canada 8,759
Chile 6,781
Netherlands 6,127
Sweden 5,526
Turkey 5,323
Pakistan 5,123
Ecuador 4,983
Colombia 4,925
China 4,641
South Africa 3,860
Egypt 3,702
Indonesia 3,469
Iraq 2,960
Bangladesh 2,275
Saudi Arabia 2,151
Romania 1,847
Argentina 1,749
Ireland 1,744
Bolivia 1,702
Switzerland 1,685
Portugal 1,646
Poland 1,562
Philippines 1,360
Ukraine 1,345
Guatemala 1,139

Every where else has less than 1000 confirmed deaths.

The full data set is available here https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths

I agree a country as small as San Marino is an inaccurate outlier; the population is less than 50,000 so including them in a deaths per million stat is going to skew things. But you can't compare total number of deaths in the US at 330 million + to the UK at around 67 million and come up with anything meaningful. For comparison of death rates per population, it makes more sense to look at the US alongside the combined EU population at 445 million. Both the EU countries and US are developed nations which also makes a difference. They're also not bald-faced lying like the CCP.

 

[Warrigal]

It isn't a contest of one nation against another. It is a fight against a virus which needs to be controlled to stop the spread. We must never forget that this is the primary focus of our efforts. It is not a political contest either. Thinking along partisan lines is counterproductive to success.

The virus hasn't worked its way through Africa yet and so far the Pacific region (Oceanania) seems to be barely touched by COVID 19.

 

[AnnieA]

It isn't a contest of one nation against another. It is a fight against a virus which needs to be controlled to stop the spread. We must never forget that this is the primary focus of our efforts. It is not a political contest either. Thinking along partisan lines is counterproductive to success.

The virus hasn't worked its way through Africa yet and so far the Pacific region (Oceanania) seems to be barely touched by COVID 19.

I understand your point about a virus not respecting borders and that we need to work together to control it. It's just irritating to me as a science major that writers of articles like the OP don't get that a country with a much higher population is going to have more deaths than a smaller country. In the scheme of controlling the global pandemic a sort of national numbers competition doesn't matter --unless you're looking at if the different ways countries are handling things are impacting outcomes. But it's bad journalism based on bad basic math and science to total up numbers without considering population density.

As for Africa, there are a lot of countries hard hit that don't have the health infrastructure to test. ...just 5.7 million tests for the virus have been conducted across the continent of 1.3 billion people per this July 9 Time article. Lots of deaths though. There again your point about thinking globally hits home. First world volunteers aren't going into third world areas and helping as they usually do because the pandemic is global in and people who would normally travel to help are needed at home.

 

[Warrigal]

Don't hold your breath waiting for responsible journalism.
You'd die from asphyxiation long before the virus gets you.

 

[Don M.]

Don't hold your breath waiting for responsible journalism. You'd die from asphyxiation long before the virus gets you.

Amen to that! There are probably dozens of important issues and events daily, but in recent weeks half, or more, of the national media's attention seems to be devoted to who can "sensationalize" this virus more. I can get more "news" from our local TV stations in 15 minutes than I can spending hours watching the Cable TV news. Thank goodness for the Internet....gobs of news, and NO condescending commercials.

 

[hollydolly]

Walk into any busy store in England or board a train on London's cramped underground system and you will see dozens of people unmasked. And you can forget about face coverings at recently reopened pubs... that's about as likely as a free pint of beer.
This despite the UK being one of the world's worst-hit countries by coronavirus -- it stands third behind Brazil and the United States -- with almost 45,000 fatalities.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/12/health/britain-masks-intl-gbr/index.html

You're reading an article based on the wrong stats. I selected this table to show deaths/1M population. The US isn't first and the UK isn't second. Journalism these days apparently doesn't require even a modicum of intelligence.

View attachment 113398

Thank goodness for someone with Intelligence... (sorry didn't mean for one minute to sound patronising)

 

[StarSong]

This is one of those cases where everyone's right. (Sad to say.) UK's 44K and US's 134K deaths - and rising - are a terrible toll no matter how one looks at it. These stats also don't take into account the many, many people who will have long-term health problems from this virus.

@Warrigal Thank you for that link. I hadn't seen it before.