> The situation looks worse to me.

What matters is numbers, not how things "look".

Yes, and if I look at the numbers it does look worse to me.

New York has a population of 20 million and it currently has a number of dead comparable to the UK with a population of 67 million, for example. New Jersey seems to fare worse than Switzerland with a comparable population, for another example.

By that metric, California is doing 10x better than Switzerland with 4x the population. And 10x better than the UK with 0.6x the population.

There are so many variables involved that it's hard to know how to rationally compare different regions. How much is demographics, population density, and other variables vs competence.

Europe is ahead of the US in this pandemic so it's not currently possible to say that somewhere in the US is doing better than a comparable location in Europe based on the raw numbers (for that one would need to look at stats relative to e.g. time since n cases).

On the other hand, it is possible to say if they seem to be doing worse.

Unless the spread was much faster in some areas than others due to population density, for instance. Back to the confounding variables question...

It's a bit tricky to compare regions because they test differently, and they count death differently.

Most of the threads comparing death across countries don't say how each of those countries is counting the deaths.

And US numbers look really, really bad compared to Europe.

Do they? Take the 5 major countries in western Europe - UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Together they have ~325M people, which is about the size of the US.

Both total cases and total deaths are higher than US. Total deaths is 4x worse. What numbers are you looking at?

All the numbers will double every 3.5 days if not properly controlled.

Give it a week and see how close the US is to overtaking Europe.

To be fair, compare US to 1/2 of Europe. So we won't know until first wave breaks.