Amid his confirmation that he “shut the nation down” if scientists told him too, Joe Biden explained just what the Trump admin had got wrong (and how to ‘fix’ it)…
“In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”
Well the good news is… as the following five charts from John Merline’s Issues & Insights blog show, the US is ‘beating’ the virus…
If the Democratic National Convention made anything clear, it is that Democrats are entirely invested in making the coronavirus pandemic look worse than it is in the United States.
Almost every speaker decried the response and blamed President Donald Trump for the scale of the disease in the country.
In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said “Just judge this president on the facts. Five million Americans infected by COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died. By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” Later he said, “We lead the world in confirmed cases. We lead the world in deaths.”
Fact checkers somehow missed Biden’s flagrant abuse of statistics. NPR’s “fact check” of Biden’s speech said only that, if anything, Biden undercounted the number of COVID-19 deaths.
But the number of infections and deaths is meaningless out of context. What matters is how many have died per capita, how many who’ve been infected have succumbed to the disease and where the trends are right now.
When you do that, the picture looks far less bleak.
The U.S. is far from the worst in the world in terms of the death rate per million population. The U.S. ranks 10th for per capita deaths worldwide, and notably better than the United Kingdom with its socialist health care scheme, and Sweden, which adopted a much more laissez-faire approach to the pandemic than the U.S.
On confirmed cases per million, the U.S. ranks 9th, but this is in part due to the extensive testing we’ve done.
In fact, despite what Biden and Co. will have you believe, we are in the top of the pack when it comes to COVID-19 tests per capita (19th out of 215 nations).
(Note also that only four of the other 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations do better than the U.S. on tests per capita.)
When it comes to the case fatality rate – the share of confirmed cases who have died – there is no comparison.
Not only does the U.S. outperform most countries – as well as the world overall – the case fatality rate in the U.S. has been steadily declining.
Finally, there’s the chart Democrats really don’t want you to see: The number of new COVID-19 cases peaked a month ago and has been trending downward ever since.
Source: Bloomberg
Not only is the epidemic becoming less deadly, but its spread has slowed.
Democrats don’t want you to know any of this, and neither does the Trump-hating press. Democrats can’t let you know if they hope to reclaim the White Hosue and take control of Congress based on fear and panic.