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A comment on Americans think they are better at social distancing than their neighbors. Parent comment

Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by tensor on Monday May 18, 2020 @11:47AM (#23223895)
>If perfect compliance was required we'd be suffering the consequence right now. Turns out, the American way of half-assing it has been sufficient to slow the spread of the virus more than enough to avert catastrophe. Even the predictable, politically-motivated free-riders haven't been enough to render our efforts ineffective (so far).

I suspect that American's are the only ones in the world that share this view. To the rest of us your response has been among the worst on the planet. We watch in horror as you intentionally throw lives away.

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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by standardUser on Monday May 18, 2020 @11:51AM (#23223972)
Per capita deaths in the US are far below the levels in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, the UK, Italy and Spain. So it must be the other parts of the world watching in horror, because many other Western nations are dealing with their own horror at the moment.
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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by dariusj18 on Monday May 18, 2020 @12:44PM (#23224805)
I think many of the statistics need more context, for example looking at death rate vs population density is interesting.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-po...

Obviously Monaco and San Marino are outliers. It looks like Sweden and Spain did a worse job; UK, France and Italy are comparable to the US; and the Netherlands seems to be doing a better job at it.

I chose population density, because it seems like a metric that would greatly change the step required to combat a Pandemic. But I think it would be a better comparison to show US states instead of the US as a whole.

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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by tensor on Monday May 18, 2020 @03:51PM (#23227533)
It isn't over, those countries have cases on the decline now, the US is still rising. It's fully reasonable to expect that the rise will go even faster now with everything opening up.

Also, the US isn't testing as much and is now also trying to avoid reporting cases in various states that are opening, so it's hard to trust the US numbers.

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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by pstrateman on Monday May 18, 2020 @12:03PM (#23224158)
It's been truly amazing to me how few people understand per capita statistics.

Virtually everybody seems to think that the US is doing much worse than Europe, when the exact opposite is the truth.

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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by tzs on Monday May 18, 2020 @12:36PM (#23224680)
The US is doing better than Andorra, San Marino, Belgium, Spain, the UK, Italy, Ireland, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands on per capita deaths. The rest of Europe is doing better [1].

If we expand beyond Europe, the list of countries that the US is doing better than remains the same. The list of countries doing better than the US massively expands, to around 180 or more.

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by pstrateman on Monday May 18, 2020 @01:56PM (#23225930)
You're just wrong man.

https://i.imgur.com/DqhlWRq.png

Reported Deaths per Capita:

  1. San Marino
  2. Belgium
  3. Andorra
  4. Spain  
  5. Italy  
  6. United Kingdom  
  7. France  
  8. Sweden  
  9. Netherlands  
  10. Ireland
Not even in the top 10.

  11. US
Unreported Deaths in the developing world are without a doubt much worse.
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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by pstrateman on Monday May 18, 2020 @12:58PM (#23225008)
Do you really think the world's poorest countries are doing better?

Or is it more likely that they just can't afford to do rt-PCR?

I'm pretty sure their numbers are just massively under reported.

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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by mnm1 on Monday May 18, 2020 @12:53PM (#23224932)
The US isn't testing enough for that conclusion to be drawn from cases per day. Looking at deaths per day, or per week, the US is number one. Perceptions are correct.
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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by standardUser on Monday May 18, 2020 @12:58PM (#23225013)
State your case that the opposite is true. How is the United States doing "much worse" than the UK, for exmaple?
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Re:Americans think they are better at social distancing than... by pstrateman on Monday May 18, 2020 @01:24PM (#23225414)
I said the US is doing better per capita than most of Europe.
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