Smashing Eggs, Dumping Milk: Farmers Waste More Food Than Ever

Re:Smashing Eggs, Dumping Milk: Farmers Waste More Food Than... by zdragnar on Monday May 18, 2020 @02:34PM (#23226548)

Meaningful comparisons require reasonably accurate data, and there is nothing like that to be found in any of these countries. Aside from the fact that testing has been minimal for a number of reasons, different areas have perverse incentives to either over or under count COVID fatalities.

In the US, any and every death of someone who had the virus, and many who did not, are still counted among the death tolls. The recent case of the guy who died from alcohol poisoning comes to mind, though I personally know of others who died from other causes, and were counted even though they hadnt been tested.

Conversely, there is good reason to be skeptical of China's accounting as well- both due to government interference and the simple fact that they were not able to reliably test the majority of cases.

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Re:Smashing Eggs, Dumping Milk: Farmers Waste More Food Than... by eggsnbacon1 on Monday May 18, 2020 @04:41PM (#23228081)

You can look at the EU average, which is close to US population and still makes the US look bad. Test positive rates can tell you how roughly how much a country is undercounting.

If US has twice the test positive rate as another, they're only testing half the cases.

The fact is no matter what metric you look at, the US is doing worse with our response than almost anywhere else.

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