Why Trump shouldn’t compare America’s Covid-19 outbreak to New Zealand’s, in one chart

President Donald Trump hosts a press briefing at the White House on August 19, 2020. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

America’s coronavirus epidemic is simply much worse than New Zealand’s — and other developed nations’.

President Donald Trump keeps claiming that New Zealand’s Covid-19 outbreak is really bad — even though America’s own epidemic, by every single measurement, completely overshadows New Zealand’s.

Trump, at a press conference on Wednesday, again brought up New Zealand: “New Zealand, by the way, had a big outbreak, and other countries that were held up to try and make us look not as good as we should look because we’ve done an incredible job.”

That followed Trump’s previous comments on Monday about New Zealand, in which he called the country’s outbreak “terrible” and claimed that, in an attempt to make him look bad, his critics had cited New Zealand, among other countries, “and now they’re saying, ‘Whoops.’”

Setting aside the weirdness of Trump’s fixation on New Zealand, this is also not a comparison that Trump should want to make. According to Our World in Data, New Zealand reported five new Covid-19 cases in its latest day of data; the US reported nearly 50,000.

Even when controlling for population, the US has done a much, much worse job than New Zealand, as this chart from 91-DIVOC shows:

91-DIVOC

This is true around the developed world. Whether it’s in comparison to Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, or New Zealand, the US is continuing to suffer a much worse Covid-19 outbreak than its developed peers. While other developed countries (especially in parts of Europe) had bad initial outbreaks, they’ve since gotten their epidemics more under control. The US’s continuing outbreak is only comparable to that of countries with much weaker government institutions and public health systems, particularly those in Latin America.

I’ve been asking experts why this is: What made the US fail so catastrophically?

They cautioned that the US was always likely to have a hard time given the country’s large size, fragmented federalist system, and libertarian streak. The public health system was already underfunded and underprepared for a major disease outbreak.

Yet many other developed countries dealt with these kinds of problems too. Public health systems are notoriously underfunded worldwide. Australia, Canada, and Germany, among others, also have federalist systems of government, individualistic societies, or both.

What makes the US truly different, experts said, is Trump’s leadership — or lack thereof. Time and time again throughout the pandemic, Trump has gone against the advice of even his own public health experts. He pushed the country to reopen too quickly. He suggested the US actually does too much testing. He downplayed the (now proven) benefits of masks, claiming that some people wore masks to spite him.

This set up a situation in which the US as a whole did essentially nothing well in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. That set America apart from its developed peers, which didn’t always do everything perfectly but typically did at least one thing right. New Zealand, for example, didn’t take up widespread masking, but it has embraced an extremely rigorous testing system — with more than 500 tests for each positive case, compared to America’s subpar 13 tests per positive case.

“While there’s variation across many countries, the thing that distinguishes the countries doing well is they took something seriously,” Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco, told me.

The result is New Zealand, and other developed countries, really did do much better than the US — despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.

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