Then use cases/capita. US has 330 million people and comparing it with #2 spot (Italy with 60 million) is completely insane, not to mention that the worse is yet to come to US.

I am all for taking a critical look at American systems and their effectiveness of the response, but the ranking by the case numbers is naive, misleading and unproductive.

Every country starts with (let's say) 1 imported case. From there, it grows. Cases/capita doesn't really mean anything until you get into the millions of cases and start thinking about what the upper bound might be.

And so ranking countries by size of outbreak seems reasonable to me.

I edited my comment with some data. The onset is staggered, the entire ranking thing is useless until the pandemic is over. It is simply a tracker, not an objective measure of the efficacy or the effectiveness of the measures each country is taking. It is too soon.

I've seen plenty of graphs where people plot the epidemics correcting for start date in each country, that seems pretty useful.

Edit: Here you go, here's one corrected for day of 100th case.

https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1241149458089418752

This is nice but still has major confounding effects that could completely change the story:

- Amount of testing

- Sampling process of testing - i.e. Policies that govern whether someone should be tested or not. Each country has their own policy.

- Demographics, especially age

- Still shows total cases, should be cases/capita

- Some effects of weather/humidity

I agree except for cases/capita. I dont see how that is relevant during the initial phases of an epidemic, as explained above.

> we seem to have many countries who have taken action yet failed to stop exponential growth

Remember the virus has an incubation period of around 2 weeks. China's numbers appeared to be increasing exponentially for 2 weeks after the lockdown, but those were mostly people infected before the lockdown.