Countries with 200 million population or more: China, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria.
Data isn't available in all categories for all countries, and data quality varies dramatically.
One should assume figures in the Big Seven are more or less gross underestimations except in the USA.
China in particular is a JOKE. Why anyone takes them seriously as a "global partner" is beyond me. Show me an honest communist and I will give you six free winning lotto numbers.
Hospital reporting is the worst. Very few countries report the data at all, which tells you they are neither motivated nor equipped to do so even though this is a pretty serious situation which is over one year old. Given how important that data is in judging the progress and severity of the pandemic, it is more than discouraging. The top five for hospitalizations are all US and Europe, the difference between true civilization and the rest being that we know the numbers at all.
The situations in Brazil and especially India are alarming given the high positivity rate in India and the high death rate in Brazil. Reports concentrating on India underreporting deaths (from Reuters and the like) in recent weeks are a sick joke compared with neighboring China which the charts say is a COVID utopia. India is a developing nation struggling to cope under an enormous strain while still remaining part of the free world, but journalists would rather criticize it than question China's glaring effrontery. The myopia is damning.
These Big Seven represent 4.065 billion of the world's population of 7.79 billion, 52.2%, and we don't have a clear picture of what's really going on with them.
What reason would there be to think positively?
Daily new cases, and deaths, per million in the US are still at last summer levels and have not made new lows. Same with hospitalizations. Case positivity is rising again and is actually at 5.8%, provisionally, in this data. Previous very recent levels in the 7s, however, have simply vanished from the record. Why? Johns Hopkins is currently showing 4%. What to believe?
Vaccinations still can't be pointed to for lowering the US numbers because the numbers remain too high. I'm sure they'll point to them once they decline as evidence for vaccine efficacy. Seasonality will be ignored. I will leave a vaccination horror story update for a separate, future post.
Why have cases and deaths and hospitalizations ebbed and flowed in the past in the absence of vaccines? I predict they'll never really say, same as we hear no good explanation for why H1N1 from 2009 simply dropped off the radar. Why did it go away despite the vaccine against it turning into a giant flop?
They can't predict pandemics' comings and goings anymore than they can predict global cooling in the 1970s, global warming in the 2000s, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 or the end of the Reagan Bull in 2000.
Man is a worm, according to the Bible, a poor player upon the stage, according to Shakespeare, an idiot whose tale is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Nothing!
 |
| daily new cases per million |
 |
| daily new deaths per million |
 |
| case positivity rate |
 |
| share of population vaccinated usa v world |
 |
| Top five countries for C19 hospitalizations |
 |
| share vaccinated in the largest countries by population |
 |
| daily new deaths/million |
 |
| daily new cases/million |
