How the US stacks up to other countries in confirmed coronavirus cases

How the US stacks up to other countries in confirmed coronavirus cases

The United States is more in line with Italy and Iran than Singapore and Hong Kong.

America is testing people for coronavirus at a lower rate than other developed countries, and yet the data also shows the rate of people diagnosed with Covid-19 in the US is steadily rising, as quickly or more quickly than our peers abroad.

We don’t know the full extent of the outbreak, and America appears to have been less prepared for a pandemic than other countries in the first place.

“Everyone working in this space would agree that no matter how you measure it, the US is far behind on this,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Vox of the coronavirus response.

Here’s how the number of confirmed cases in the US compare to select other countries, based on days since each country reached 100 confirmed cases, according to data we analyzed from the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus dashboard. (This is an adaptation of a widely shared chart made by the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch.)

As of March 12, the Johns Hopkins researchers counted about 1,600 confirmed cases in the US. The actual number of cases is likely much higher. As you can see, the confirmed cases in the US are already more in line with Iran and Italy than with places like Hong Kong and Singapore, where the governments were able to mobilize more quickly. Japan, like the US, has been criticized over not having enough tests to properly judge the true number of cases.

And the slow start of testing in the US is only going to exacerbate the situation.

Testing is important not only because it gets people diagnosed and appropriate treatment if they do have an infection. It also establishes how widespread a virus actually is. Experts know the size of the problem, they know the rate at which people are being hospitalized or dying, and they can follow its movements. That leads to a more informed response.

But the United States has faltered in rolling out coronavirus tests, putting us far behind our economic peers in tracing the outbreak. A manufacturing problem with the test kits that were initially sent out in the field, and a delay in approving commercial tests, set the nation back in stopping or slowing down Covid-19.

As of March 12, Americans had tested fewer than 10,000 people total when South Korea was testing that number of people in a day. Even Italy, where the coronavirus’s spread has forced the country to shut down, is testing people at a much higher rate than the US.

 Christina Animashaun/Vox
An adaptation of a chart by Skye Gould for Business Insider.

For now, given the testing problems, one of the central problems facing America during this pandemic is the lack of testing. We don’t know how big the problem is.

“The testing failure is putting additional strain on our already challenged health system,” Cynthia Cox, director of the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker, said. “The combination of all of these factors will make the US worse off than similar countries.”

Author: Dylan Scott

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