{"id":25105,"date":"2020-05-21T20:19:50","date_gmt":"2020-05-22T03:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=25105"},"modified":"2020-05-21T20:19:50","modified_gmt":"2020-05-22T03:19:50","slug":"why-america-has-the-worlds-most-confirmed-covid-19-cases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=25105","title":{"rendered":"Why America has the world’s most confirmed Covid-19 cases"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

President Trump<\/a><\/span>\u00a0said Tuesday the fact that the United States has the most coronavirus cases in the world is a \u201cbadge of honor\u201d because it shows how much testing the country is doing.<\/p>\n

While there are many factors at play when comparing how countries have fared in the coronavirus pandemic, public health experts say Trump\u2019s explanation left out a key factor: The U.S. has so many cases because it was initially slow to respond to the outbreak and ramp up testing and other containment tools.<\/p>\n

Experts say the U.S. is not alone in being hit hard by the virus because of a slow response, and it\u2019s not off-the-charts worse when comparing on a per-person basis. Rather, the U.S. is similar to Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom \u2014 countries that have also been dealt a heavy blow from the virus.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe’re probably grouped in with other worse countries,\u201d said Ron Waldman, a professor at George Washington University\u2019s school of public health. \u201cCertainly Italy got killed, Spain got killed, Belgium, the U.K.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. now has more than 1.5 million coronavirus cases and over 92,000 deaths, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker, far more than numbers reported anywhere else in the world, though there are doubts about the accuracy of China\u2019s figures.<\/p>\n

The U.S. of course has a larger population than most countries, with almost 330 million residents. But even on a per-person basis, it ranks near the top in both cases and deaths. It has the 11th most cases per person of any country and ranks 13th in deaths, according to\u00a0data compiled<\/a>\u00a0by The New York Times.<\/p>\n

And when it comes to testing on a per-person basis, the U.S. is far from the leader, despite recent improvements. Denmark, for example, conducts about twice as many tests per person as the U.S., according to figures compiled by\u00a0Our World in Data<\/a>, yet still has less than half the cases of the U.S. per person.<\/p>\n

Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said no \u201cserious person\u201d thinks the U.S. has the most cases in the world because of its testing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just that we had such a massive outbreak and we had six weeks of complete blindness to the pandemic because we had little or no testing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The weeks during which the Trump administration did not ramp up testing capabilities allowed the virus to spread undetected, Jha said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSix weeks is a long time to not be paying attention to the biggest pandemic in a century,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The countries that fared the best were the ones that quickly implemented widespread testing, contact tracing, isolation of infected people and quarantining of close contacts, experts said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe countries that have been most successful are the ones that instituted those four elements of a coherent strategy early,\u201d Waldman said.<\/p>\n

He noted it was \u201ca little bit easier\u201d for smaller countries like New Zealand and South Korea, which are two of the countries that responded best. But even then, \u201ccompared to other countries, we got a very late start, very late start.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, Germany, a country with a population of about 83 million and a culture that\u2019s broadly similar to the United States\u2019s, is seen as doing fairly well in fighting the virus. It has 212 cases per 100,000 people, compared to 470 in the U.S., and 10 deaths per 100,000, compared to 28 in the U.S., according to New York Times data.<\/p>\n

On an absolute basis, the U.S. has by far the highest number of reported cases in the world, though one important caveat is the widespread doubt about the accuracy of the numbers reported out of China, where the outbreak began.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t think China\u2019s outbreak is bigger than America\u2019s, but am I sure? No, I\u2019m not sure,\u201d Jha said.<\/p>\n

Some major European countries like Italy and the U.K. also \u201cdithered\u201d in their response, much like the U.S., Jha said. \u201cI would not say across the board Europe had a better response,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Another factor is the size and diversity of the United States, especially given the various approaches from 50 states. States like Washington and Ohio have received high marks for their responses and \u201cwould compare very favorably with some of the best parts of Europe,\u201d Jha said.<\/p>\n

But overall, the failure to initially ramp up testing, contact tracing and isolation of infected people and their contacts, as South Korea did, is what contributed to the surge in U.S. cases, experts say.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had the first case on the same day, identified on the same day, and we took incredibly divergent paths, and here we are,\u201d said Gavin Yamey, associate director for policy at the Duke Global Health Institute.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Trump\u00a0said Tuesday the fact that...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25106,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25105\/revisions\/25106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}