F*ck Yeah! America Dies of COVID-19 Better Than Any Other Industrialized Country

 

You have probably heard of American exceptionalism, the idea that here in 'Merica we are different from and better than other countries. Many people question whether that is true.

I don't want to wade into that debate, but it is true in at least one ignoble sense: We die of COVID-19 better than any other industrialized country, according to data just published by the New York Times.

I can't tell the exact numbers because their graphs are not interactive and the axes aren't well done. But eyeballing their graphs we edge-out Belgium for the number one spot in cumulative deaths per 100K. We appear to be around 150% higher than Canada. 

We look to be more than 2x higher than Japan despite the shitshow that was their vaccine rollout. On deaths from the Omicron wave no other country even comes close.

Why? One reason is poor vaccine uptake, according to NYT's graphs. We are well below all the other industrialized countries in share of population fully vaccinated, and also well below all those countries except Japan in share of population boosted.

But a study just out in The Lancet suggests some additional reasons. They looked at a bunch of factors—like population density, body mass index, altitude, smoking prevalence and so on—that might affect pandemic outcomes across a number of countries. 

They also measured some social factors like interpersonal trust and trust in government (based on Gallup World Values survey). Then they related all of these things to either infection rates or infection-to-fatality ratio (IFR).

Of all the predictors they looked at that had significant (i.e. reliably non-random) effects, the highest by far was age structure, which accounted for 46.7% of variation in IFR. So the older your population the more fatalities you have per case. Makes sense. But the number two and three factors were interpersonal trust (16.5% of variation in infection rates) and trust in government (7.4%). 

I grabbed the Gallup data to see how the U.S. fares on these measures. For interpersonal trust we rank 44th of 50 countries studied. Unfortunately trust in government seems to be a weighted combination of several related scales in the Gallup survey and I could not find the composite. But it's no secret that we 'Mericans—as a group—don't trust the damn government.

So there you have it. Despite being the richest country in the world with the most resources for fighting the pandemic, we have the worst outcomes of any rich country. And it is, in significant part, because we neither trust each other nor our government. 

These trust issues no doubt explain our poor vaccine update, suggesting it's not trust per se but the effects of low trust on other protective behaviors like getting vaccinated. Whatever the case, that's a pretty sorry  conclusion, and another hole in the American exceptionalism balloon.




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