The number of corona-virus cases for U.S.A as of August 27 is 6,086,178 deaths are 185,692 and the death rate is 3.05%. There are four states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan, under DOJ investigation because they required nursing homes to admit and readmit COVID-19 cases resulting in many deaths. If these states are excluded from the count the death rate would be 2.35%
The Democratic convention speakers assured us that this was the worst result of any country in the world, thanks to President Trump’s inaction and refusal to accept science. So, how does U.S.A. compare to the rest of the world? The cases, deaths and death rates for all countries with higher death rates are listed below:
1. Yemen 1,943 563 29.0%
2. Italy 265,409 35,472 13.4%
3. United Kingdom 331,644 41,486 12.5%
4. Belgium 83,500 9,884 11.8%
5. France 267,077 30,596 11.5%
6. Hungary 5,511 614 11.1%
7. Mexico 579,914 62,594 10.8%
8. Netherlands 69,131 6,220 9.0%
9. Channel Islands 625 48 7.7%
10. Chad 1,008 77 7.6%
11. Canada 127,074 9,108 7.2%
12. Spain 455,621 29,011 7.1%
13. Isle of Man 336 24 7.1%
14. Sweden 83,958 5,821 6,9%
15. Sudan 13,082 823 6.3%
16. Liberia 1,298 82 6.3%
17. Ireland 28,578 1,778 6.2%
18. San Marino 710 42 5.9%
19. Niger 1,173 69 5.9%
20. Ecuador 112,141 6,504 5.8%
21. Iran 369,911 21,249 5.7%
22. Egypt 98,062 5,342 5.4%
23. Switzerland 41,346 2,004 4.8%
23. Slovenia 2,797 133 4.8%
25. Andorra 1,124 53 4.7%
26. Mali 2,736 126 4.6%
27. Peru 621,997 28,277 4.5%
28. Indonesia 165,887 7,169 4.3%
29. Barbados 165 7 4,2%
29. Finland 8,042 335 4.2%
29. North Macedonia 14,163 590 4.2%
29. Bolivia 113,129 4,791 4.2%
33. Burkina Faso 1,352 55 4.1%
33. Tanzania 509 21 4.1%
34. Germany 242,101 9,360 3.9%
35. Sint Maarten 444 17 3.8%
36. Denmark 16,700 624 3.7%
36. Guatemala 72,921 2,709 3.7%
36. Afghanistan 38,140 1,402 3,7%
26. Bulgaria 15,908 594 3.7%
40. Brazil 3,772,945 118,988 3.2%
41. Iraq 223,612 6,814 3.1%
41. Poland 65,480 2,018 3.1%
That’s right! U.S.A. ranks as 43th worst country!
Now there are countries that do better, some much better. One group has this in common: They administer a proper therapy of hydroxychloroquine, most often with Zinc and Z-max as soon as symptoms occur, with or without a positive test. Some of the countries are so poor that it is all they can afford. The result?
Country Cases Deaths
1. Qatar 118,196 196 0.2% The country of Qatar consists of 88% temporary workers between the ages of 20 and 60 and most of the deaths occurred in the remaining 12% of the original population. This means that the death rate of persons between the ages of 20 and 60 is less than 0.2% if given HCQ + Zinc as soon as symptoms occur or as a prophylactic administered instead of contact tracing and quarantine. If this regimen would be implemented immediately we could fully open schools and universities, have college and professional sports again and fully open all businesses. Only protect the most vulnerable.
2. Bahrain 50,756 189 0.4% Again, about half of the population are immigrants or guest workers. They have a high rate of obesity and diabetes, but HCQ seems to be working excellent in Bahrain
3. UAE 68,901 379 0.6% The United Arab Emirates is a nation of 88% non-citizen immigrants and guest workers. there are over twice as many males as there are females.
4. Israel 112,000 894 0.8%
5. Costa Rica 38,485 407 1.1%
6. Malaysia 9,306 125 1.3%
7. Russia 980,405 16,914 1.7%
8. South Korea 19,077 316 1.7%
9. India 3,461,240 62,713 1.8%
10. Morocco 58,489 1,052 1.8%
11. Ukraine 114,497 2,451 2.1%
12. Senegal 13,384 279 2.1%
13. Turkey 265,515 6,245 2.4%
14. Cuba 3,866 92 2.4%
15. Greece 9,800 259 2.6%
There are countries that are not doing as well as U.S.A. in combating the corona pandemic, even though they freely administer HCQ. They are
16. Algeria 43,403 1,483 3.4%
17.Indonesia 165,887 7,169 4.3%
and probably others. Many countries’ health statistics are of dubious accuracy. That is why China is excluded.
Other countries, such as
Iceland 2,092 10 0.5%
Faeroe Islands 411 0 0.0%
Japan 64,668 1,226 1.9% have had success with a thorough contact tracing and quarantine. This can only be done if caught at the earliest stages of the disease. Remember, Japan never allowed the people from the infected cruise ship to enter Japanese soil and be treated in hospitals.
Vaccine may not be as effective as first thought. The china corona virus has mutated into 11 strains, and continues to mutate, so a universal vaccine cannot be developed, but like the flu, every year will have a new strain to combat.
The only solution is to implement a hydroxychloroquine + Zinc + Zitromax regimen, both as a prophylactic and as a therapy as soon as symptoms occur.
According to the Ford study treatment with hydroxychloroquine cut the death rate significantly in sick patients hospitalized with COVID-19 – and without heart-related side-effects, according to a new study published by Henry Ford Health System. The death rate was cut in half for patients treated with HCQ. It is even more dramatic if HCQ is administered as soon as symptoms occur, over 40 international studies have shown an up to 80+% reduction in death rates. For some reason FDA and CDC do not acknowledge international studies. They rather let people die than accept a drug that has been approved for over50 years, and given freely to people with Lupus. It is so safe it is even given to pregnant women and nursing mothers.
How many extra deaths are we talking about? HCQ is already administered under right to try by about 16% of all cases. If it had been recommended in April, one month after President Trump recommended it based on excellent results in french studies, about half the deaths from then on could have been avoided. It adds up, about 1.5% of all cases since April 15, or about 78,000 deaths could have been avoided, and moving forward about 600 deaths a day. This is in my opinion a low estimate.
Another significant moment in the hydroxychloroquine debate came on July 23 in the form of an opinion piece. Harvey A. Risch, MD, PhD, a professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health with years of healthcare experience, wrote in favor of the medication, calling it “highly effective” and describing physicians who use it “in the face of widespread skepticism” as heroes.
In his opinion piece, Risch listed several studies that have pointed to the benefits of treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine. He also wrote about how the medication has been politicized and said it “has not been used properly in many studies.”
“In the future, I believe this misbegotten episode regarding hydroxychloroquine will be studied by sociologists of medicine as a classic example of how extra-scientific factors overrode clear-cut medical evidence,” he concluded. “But for now, reality demands a clear, scientific eye on the evidence and where it points. For the sake of high-risk patients, for the sake of our parents and grandparents, for the sake of the unemployed, for our economy and for our polity, especially those disproportionally affected, we must start treating immediately.”
His assessment of lives saved with HCQ ++ was 70,000 lives would have been saved as of Aug 1 if HCQ had been used as early as possible. He is the scientist, I am using public data drawn from a population of 2 billion people, and we reached a very similar conclusion.
Do it! The fact that President Trump has advocated it as early as March should not be a hindrance to save 600 lives a day!
The death rate calculated as a percentage of detected cases (“case fatality rate” or CFR) is not nearly as important as the death rate per million population.
As our medical community gains experience treating the disease, the CFR is falling. That’s a very good thing, but it is not nearly as important as preventing infections, in the first place.
By that measure, the U.S. is failing, horribly.
Some countries have almost completely stopped the spread of the epidemic, simply by quickly identifying and quarantining those who are infected. (They use rapid testing and quick contact-tracing to do it.)
In other countries, the disease is raging out of control, because incompetent authorities have failed to identify and quarantine many of those who are infected. Unfortunately, the United States is one of those countries.
I’m not mainly blaming the federal government: in the United States, it is State governments that have primary responsibility in such matters, and all fifty States have demonstrated colossal incompetence.
The U.S. CFR is only modestly worse than that of South Korea, but our U.S. fatality rate per million population is 90 times worse than South Korea’s, simply because they have competently managed the disease — and the United States has not.
The difference is that South Korea quickly and efficiently identifies, contact-traces and quarantines nearly everyone who is infected. In the United States testing is haphazard, slow & often restricted, test results may not reported even to the patients and the patients’ doctors for days, and contact-tracing is woefully inadequate, when it is done at all. That incompetence has cost over 180,000 American lives, so far.
BTW, one nit: you wrote, “HCQ+Zinc+Z-max” but I don’t think there’s such a thing as “Z-max.” The Zithromax brand of azithromycin is called a Z-Pak (the “Pak” presumably referring to its distinctive packaging, with just six pills, for a 5-day dosing schedule).
As to nitpicking, I looked up brand names for Azithromycin they are Zithromax, Zithromax Z-Pak, Zmax, AzaSite, and Zithromax TRI-PAK. Not being a M.D. I chose the shortest name, but did inadvertently insert a hyphen.
For this analysis I was not so concerned about the total effect on the different countries, only how deadly the china-virus is with or without the proper early therapeutics. As to contact tracing, try to contact trace the protestors!
As to South Korea, they did well on both accounts, contact tracing and proper early therapeutics.
Fortunately, only a small percentage of Americans are protesters.
The way contact-tracing works, you start with a suspected infection: either someone with symptoms, or else someone suspected to have had contact with someone with the disease. In either case, the person is either quarantined or asked to self-isolate pending test results.
Then you test him. That can be done very quickly: we have tests, now, which can give results in under 15 minutes! (Someone whose suspected contact with an infected person was recent might need to be re-tested several times, to be confident that he’s not infected, so that he can safely cease self-isolating.)
As soon as find someone with a positive test result, you order him into strict quarantine, and you interview him to identify his contacts.
Obviously, there are circumstances in which an infected person could have infected other people that you cannot find. If he’s a protester, or if he’s a New Yorker who rides the subway, then he could have infected dozens of people whom you cannot identify (because Cuomo & DeBlasio are idiots).
But, in most cases, you can probably find most of a patient’s highest-risk contacts. By contacting and testing them, you stand a very good chance of finding all or most of the people that he infected (and perhaps also the person who infected your patient, if you don’t already know who that was). For the people he infected, there’s a very good chance that, because you promptly notified them, they will self-isolate before they even become contagious, so they’ll never infect anyone else, at all. That’s how the epidemic is stopped.
The key to making it work is speed. If you test an infected person in the morning, then by that same afternoon most of his identifiable contacts should have been contacted, and should be self-isolating, and should be getting their tests. The quicker you work, the smaller the chance that someone will have already infected thirty people at a protest, or in a subway car, or at church, before he’s found and notified.
Some contacts will certainly escape your detection, and some secondary infections will still occur, but if you reduce the average number of secondary infections per infected patient to much less than 1.0, then the epidemic will quickly end. In South Korea, that took just three weeks.
However, that can’t happen unless public officials are reasonably competent. In the United States, hardly any of them are. Near here (in North Carolina) we had a plumber who felt ill, and got tested. But due mostly to state bureaucratic delays, he wasn’t told that his test result was positive a full week — and in that week he continued to work, and infected over a dozen households.
Every one of those secondary infections was completely unnecessary. They would not have happened in South Korea. In South Korea that plumber would have had his test results in mere hours, and within a few more hours most of his likely contacts would have been notified and told to self-isolate and get tested.
That plumber, and the people he infected, are what catastrophic, IPCC-level incompetence looks like, at a local level. In fact, NC state officials are actively making the epidemic worse, by restricting the medical personnel who may administer the tests, by unnecessarily delaying testing, and by restricting & delaying the reporting of test results.