In the case of US vs Canada, perhaps it does. Canadians have a high level of trust in expert civil servants, including public health officials. There is also a general Canadian pragmatism that kicks in: politicians from across the country and across the political spectrum have handled the pandemic fairly consistently. The public remains mostly supportive of the federal, provincial and local initiatives. It has not been perfect, but we have not seen local officials warring with the Premier or the Premier warring with the PM on the issue of pandemic response.
In terms of education, Canada leads the world in working-age adults with post-secondary education[0]. Though primary and secondary education is a provincial and local matter, it tends to be consistently good in most of the country.
In this rural county, daily new infections are at something like 400/million. That rate is arrived at with a big enough multiplier, but it is a reasonable basis for comparison. Our cumulative case / million is ~23000.
* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-po...
See also:
> We also find that after controlling for metropolitan population, county density is not significantly related to the infection rate, possibly due to more adherence to social distancing guidelines. However, counties with higher densities have significantly lower virus-related mortality rates than do counties with lower densities, possibly due to superior health care systems.
* https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2020.1...
On that scatterplot you linked, Canada is way down there in terms of population density. Yet the vast majority of Canada’s land area is uninhabited wilderness to the north. Most Canadians live within a narrow band of cities running parallel to the U.S. border. In addition, a significant minority live in many scattered rural areas outside of that band.
So the question is: how do you measure Canada’s true population density? Do you only look at the high density band? Or do you include the rural areas? Where do you draw the line between rural and wilderness? There’s no easy answer.
Look at past pandemics for reference, everybody was hit. The Spanish Flu spread in isolated arctic populations just as well as NYC.
remember that in the US, we're still barely in the beginning of this thing. trying to claim correctness of action is largely meaningless as we neither have herd immunity nor have felt the economic impacts of our policies. 9/10 NYC business can't pay full rent
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24574314
personally, it seems the economic dangers are far larger than the health effects at this point. with that lens, id prefer a republican next term, even if its trump. well, id prefer a libertarian (and the first female president at that!) but thats a nonstarter for some reason.
Yes, welcome to the nash equilibrium of polarized first past the post politics.
And there have been protests against the restrictions including one on Parliament Hill.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-19-rally-ottawa-1.570...
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/canada?countr...
The protests have been very, very small. The population, based on polls, supports masks.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/civic-duty-or-infr...
What’s going on in Canada is, I think, what’s going on in Europe: pandemic fatigue. It sucks to be socially distanced for this long, and people’s guards go down. I don’t think we are seeing the almost nihilistic denial that you see in parts of the States here; we’re just tired.
If you look at someone like Doug Ford, the extremely conservative, pro-business premier of Ontario, he has consistently advocated for masking and lockdowns as needed. He was tight-fisted with funds for testing, and overly eager to reopen businesses before fall/winter when outdoor dining would be untenable. That set the stage for our current outbreak, but he hasn't done anything on the level of Trump or Rick Scott.
Media had a brief report that a boat flipped over. No other mention of the rally.
Seeing daily rallies and parades Driving around now. Zero mention on local news channels.
Drove threw 3 states. We saw one Biden bumper sticker. No signs. Thousands of Trump signs.
Media is extremely biased in its reporting.
Is it at all possible that those three states were “red” states?
That only played a role very early on, at the beginning of the pandemic, when imported cases drove spread of the virus.
As the pandemic goes on, community spread becomes the dominant factor, so policies that affect transmission can have a huge effect.
The most dramatic example of this is China. The virus began there, so they had zero time to prepare. They were more "in the path of the storm" than anyone. There was a major outbreak in Hubei province, and the virus gained a foothold in every major city in the country. But then, beginning in late January, China had an extremely strict lockdown that lasted several weeks. Transmission chains ended, and the prevalence of the virus was brought down to a minimal level. Since then, extensive testing and symptom checks in public have kept the epidemic from resurging, and the government has reacted with immediate lockdowns wherever the virus has resurfaced. Compare that to the US (and many countries, though the US is one of the most extreme examples), where the epidemic has been allowed to continue for months.
By excess deaths, the US is doing way better per capita than somewhere like France.
The idea that Europe is somehow much less racist than the US, for instance, is laughable.
Both are true -> EU citizens are much older.
Italy has a much larger percentage of population over 80 than the rest of Europe due to climate, migration patterns, and WWII.
Compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/media... vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy#/media/F...
Both countries have a similar percentage of 65+ year olds, but COVID gets rapidly more deadly as you get older and Germany‘s very oldest generation is devastated. For comparison 31.30% of US covid deaths are from 85+ year olds.
Now take a look back at the male and female 90-94 and 95-99 year old slices of both of those charts you said looked similar.
When you see really strong outliers, you need to at least consider the explanatory power of incentives.
I think the US has mismanaged the crisis, but I also think there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the numbers.