Trump is a Rock Star! Six Nations Covid-19 Results Compared

[aeschylus]

I recently argued with a friend over Trump’s response to Covid-19. The friend strongly argued that Trump was akin to a rock star in his handling of this crisis. The gist of his argument is that nobody is better at getting industry to do what needs to be done in this crisis than Trump.

With that in mind, I’d like to compare death rates per capita across a sample of six countries to see whether Trump is indeed the rock star leader of Covid-19 response. Death was chosen as a metric vs. measured infections, as measured infections are highly dependent upon the efficacy of each countries testing regimen. Per capita death rates were chosen as a metric, as it is simply unfair to compare total deaths for the United States (with a population of 330M) to the corresponding totals in smaller countries. All numbers are scaled to US population size to make the comparison easily understood.

Since the argument is that Trump is a pandemic rock star, I chose well managed countries for comparison. Two countries from each of North America, Europe, and Asia were chosen for this analysis. Democratic countries whose numbers could be trusted formed the basis for this limited sample. Without further ado, here is the data:

[link:|

Note that a number of other nations such as Denmark or New Zealand could have been selected. From this sample, a case could be made that Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is the world’s real rock star of Covid-19 management. One can read about Taiwan’s Covid-19 leadership in this article:

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/14/834431383/taiwan-reports-no-new-coronavirus-cases-adding-to-success-in-fighting-pandemic

The most compelling statistic is that between seven to fourteen instances of 9/11 level deaths could have been prevented in the United States under alternative leadership. In comparison to well managed countries, the US response corresponds to an additional 9/11 magnitude viral event occurring in our country at least every other week. As I said to my friend, if this is your definition of rock-star performance, I dread to think of what still lies in store for the USA in the months ahead.

[captain queeg]

1. You can't reason with unreasonable folks.

They’ve already made up their minds. If facts don’t agree with their beliefs they’ll always fall back on “fake news”. It would be funny that the king of lies talks about fake news if people weren’t dying and the economy weren’t crashing.

[liberalla]

2. So what did your friend say?

[ProfessorGAC]

3. Useless

If this performance as POTUS is considered rock star stuff, that person is unreachable.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

4. A rock star?

You mean like a burned out drug addled hedonistic numbskull destined to choke on his own vomit? I guess I can see that.....of course they'll never be sure who's vomit it actually was.

[aeschylus]

5. The data in the chart is what is most important.

There was no real dialogue with my friend. We spoke across a very deep chasm. That is why I presented my counter-argument here in the form of data. I hope that members take the time to look at that data.