I don't see Germany doing anything well except testing. IE, they haven't controlled infecting, which is increasing exponentially[1]. Germany originally had an ideal seeming death rate of only 0.2%.
But that was a rather illusory achievement that could be explained by finding all the infection but not stopping them (they're at 0.6% now, a significant increase and this will naturally continue increasing). By Tomas Pueyo's important calculation, one death implies up to 800 infections (1% death rate plus three weeks of doubling from when the patient contradicted the disease)[2]. So if you did find all those infections, you can see a very low apparent death rate but you wouldn't have reduced the actual death rate or the infection rate and you'd still be hurdling towards the situation of having so many cases your health system is overwhelmed and your death rate shoots up.
Angel Merkel said 30-70% of the country might catch the virus, which is pretty much poisonous "herd immunity" Koolaid that Boris Johnson spouted (now that fatalities have spiked in the UK, he's singing a different tune and I hope Merkel will also).
[1] https://cv19info.live/germany/ [2] https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
What are their real case and death numbers? We'll never know, because they've lied about everything from day one. They have been the exact opposite of transparent about anything.
China only had ~82,000 cases, but Italy, Germany and Spain are all going to surpass that? Yeah right. Inflate China's numbers by 10x and you might be close. In late January / early February they magically changed which cases they were counting toward their official figures, intentionally excluding mild cases that tested positive. That's what produced the instant tapering you see in their case numbers from that date in time forward. It's also why their case growth graph looks so unique - bizarre - compared to everyone else that has had a bad outbreak.
There's supply chain evidence that things are going back to normal on China side. They wouldn't be able to hide all these deaths that would happen if they just told the sick people to go back to work.
Meanwhile, there's very little evidence that would suggest their numbers are lies. Sure, they weren't exactly forthcoming at the beginning - but then again, until few days ago, US government was lying even more than they did, and yet we don't assume this means today's numbers are bullshit (as opposed to being limited by still-lacking testing capability).
Given the scale of difficulty, the country has moved swiftly.
It is yet to be seen if it is even possible to organize a shutdown the solve this problem, at India's scale. But, even the naysayers have acknowledged that in this case Modi made good decisions.
The fact that people like Cuomo are now being praised for the way they handled this suggests that we aren't going to learn the lessons we need to.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/bill-de-blasio-andre...
Several Western European nations are seeing far higher per capita case loads and death rates.
Several prominent healthcare systems across Europe have proven wildly incompetent so far, including Spain, Italy and Britain (which is barely doing any testing). The famed French healthcare system is proving barely able to handle what's going on there, thus their very high mortality rate.
A. Doing far more testing
B. Further along the pandemic curve
Give it another week or two and you'll see how bad things are really going to be.
But most of the US didn't really get their act together with testing until this week. We're a little delayed both in transmission and in testing, and the US is not showing any deviance from exponential growth at the moment.
Let me know when the US has six times the per capita cases of Italy, then we'll talk.
Italy currently has a death figure roughly 40 times higher per capita than the US. If you scaled it to the US population, it'd be around 50,000 dead.
Let me know when the US has a per capita death figure 40 times higher than Italy.
Of course nobody wants to look at the disaster going on in the EU. The way the EU has entirely let Italy and Spain down. How Spain is having to beg NATO for supplies because their EU friends are leaving them to fend for themselves. The way China has helped Italy more than the EU. Some more things nobody wants to talk about: the extremely high mortality rates in Italy, Spain, France; the lack of testing in Britain; the lack of basic medical supplies across Western Europe, leaving doctors in Spain and Italy to work with bare hands and without masks; the hyper infection rates among healthcare workers in Western Europe due to poor practices and lack of medical gear; the shift to leaving patients over 60 to die because they can't help them any longer, producing the terrifying death rates in Italy and Spain.
"Spanish army finds care home residents 'dead and abandoned'"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023
Bloomberg: "Spanish Doctors Are Forced to Choose Who to Let Die"
"‘We are collapsing’: Virus pummels medics in Spain and Italy"
https://apnews.com/7ec91dc45d8d7c2ea86b0a97446a303a
"Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60. Dr. Gai Peleg told Israeli television that in northern Italy, the orders are not to allow those over 60 access to respiratory machines."
https://www.jpost.com/International/Israeli-doctor-in-Italy-...
Bloomberg: "Europe’s Desperate Doctors Are Shielded by Trash Bags"
Foreign Policy: "The EU Is Abandoning Italy in Its Hour of Need"
“Old people [in Spain] have been abandoned in an astonishing way,” said Carmen Flores, head of patient rights group Defensor del Paciente.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...
You're off by an order of magnitude. The US has 260/million and Italy has 1275/million. That's 4.9 times higher, not 40.
US cases are currently doubling every 4 days. New cases in Italy have dropped, and they are no longer experiencing exponential growth. If that continues, we'll catch them in about a week.
And Italy, where 1 in 10K have already died?
In some respects, China's initial response was poor. The government in Wuhan forced the doctor who was warning about the virus on social media to shut up, and it did not ban large public events quickly enough.
In other respects, China's initial response was excellent. Immediately after the first suspicious cases of pneumonia were reported by local doctors in Wuhan, the Chinese CDC sent a team to Wuhan to investigate. China alerted the WHO just two days later. It then announced the discovery of a new coronavirus about a week after alerting the WHO. It published the genetic sequence of the virus two days after that. Two weeks later, it quarantined Wuhan, a city of over 10 million people. Two weeks may seem like a long time, but compare that to how long it's taken for governments in Western countries to take similarly drastic actions.
Singapore experienced SARS, which also took the lives of doctors and nurses in addition to their patients. That country’s healthcare system has been stress-tested in a way that most haven’t.
I think the San Francisco Bay Area counties did a pretty decent job (not S. Korea or Singapore, but that's a high bar) and I'm optimistic that they've significantly bent the curve (that's what I see plotting the data), but can't be very confident until after this weekend.
Singapore has done well, but besides them there have been lots of missteps all over.