Issues & Insights If the Democratic National Convention made anything clear, it is that Democrats are entirely invested in making the coronavirus pandemic look worse than it is in the United States.
Almost every speaker decried the response and blamed President Donald Trump for the scale of the disease in the country.
In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said “Just judge this president on the facts. Five million Americans infected by COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died. By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” Later he said, “We lead the world in confirmed cases. We lead the world in deaths.”
Fact checkers somehow missed Biden’s flagrant abuse of statistics. NPR’s “fact check” of Biden’s speech said only that, if anything, Biden undercounted the number of COVID-19 deaths.
But the number of infections and deaths is meaningless out of context. What matters is how many have died per capita, how many who’ve been infected have succumbed to the disease and where the trends are right now.
When you do that, the picture looks far less bleak.
The U.S. is far from the worst in the world in terms of the death rate per million population. The U.S. ranks 10th for per capita deaths worldwide, and notably better than the United Kingdom with its socialist health care scheme, and Sweden, which adopted a much more laissez-faire approach to the pandemic than the U.S.
On confirmed cases per million, the U.S. ranks 9th, but this is in part due to the extensive testing we’ve done. In fact, despite what Biden and Co. will have you believe, we are in the top group when it comes to COVID-19 tests per capita. (Note that only four of the other 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations do better than the U.S. on tests per capita. Also, every country that does better than the U.S. has a significantly smaller population — some just tens of thousands. In fact, if you add up the populations of every country in the top 17, it equals a little more than half the U.S. population. )
When it comes to the case fatality rate – the share of confirmed cases who have died – there is no comparison. Not only does the U.S. outperform most countries – as well as the world overall – the case fatality rate in the U.S. has been steadily declining.
Finally, there’s the chart Democrats really don’t want you to see: The number of new COVID-19 cases peaked a month ago and has been trending downward ever since.
Not only is the epidemic becoming less deadly, but its spread has slowed.
Democrats don’t want you to know any of this, and neither does the Trump-hating press. Democrats can’t let you know if they hope to reclaim the White Hosue and take control of Congress based on fear and panic.
So share these charts far and wide.
Editor’s note: The above chart has confused some readers. The countries that have conducted more than 1 million tests “per million” actually have tiny populations. Andorra, for example, has just over 77,000 people, but has conducted more than 135,000 tests, according to Worldometer. When you convert these numbers to tests “per million” it works out to 1.8 million. Also, this chart only shows the top 18 countries by this measure, not the entire list of more than 200 tracked by Worldometer. And as we note in the body of this piece, every country doing better than the U.S. has significantly smaller populations than the U.S.,
Editor’s note: After publishing this piece, we came across a study published by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, which finds that masks and lockdowns have had no meaningful impact on the spread of the disease or the number of deaths. These interventions “have varied in their timing and implementation across countries and states, but the trends in outcomes do not,” the study finds. This is the sort of science that Democrats and the press repeatedly claim to revere, yet they have studiously ignored this and other similar findings in their zeal to politicize the pandemic.