COVID-19: An International Overview

 

COVID-19 case counts, mortality rates vary widely across developed world

 

Livio Di Matteo

Appeared in the Epoch Times, May 26, 2021

 

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the pandemic is that there was no uniform pattern of impact across advanced countries. The pandemic unfolded differently in each developed country, and governments that spent more did not as a rule more successfully contain the virus or better maintain their economies.

From the first reports of a pneumonia of unknown origin in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic grew and spread around the world, with massive impacts on health, mortality rates, economies, and government budgets. Currently, the global tally is nearly 165 million cases and 3.5 million deaths. With the spread of new variants and differential rates of vaccination around the world, the effects of the pandemic will continue to reverberate worldwide.

 

However, we can already learn from this pandemic to help shape responses to future outbreaks.

Many people, including policymakers, view the pandemic as unprecedented or surprising, but only because the technological and economic progress of the 21st century—and resulting high living standards—has caused many to lose historical perspective. Plague and pestilence have been part of the human experience since the start of recorded history. Pandemics have happened before and will happen again. Nevertheless, many countries were caught unprepared for COVID-19.

 

Moreover, the pandemic did not strike everyone simultaneously, and even with additional time, some advanced countries seemed unable to heed warning signs and act quickly to implement proactive measures. Despite our instantaneous 21st-century communication and information dissemination, many countries seemingly had to experience their own pandemic before taking the matter seriously—even countries that experienced past viral outbreaks such as SARS.

 

As such, the pandemic’s effects were surprisingly severe in developed countries. For example, the International Monetary Fund’s advanced economies, which comprise only 18 percent of all countries, in 2020 accounted for 40 percent of the 30 countries with the highest COVID-19 deaths per million (although the older populations of advanced countries were a key factor in initial death tolls).

 

In the absence of vaccines or effective treatments, the world’s first year of the pandemic response unfolded more like a medieval plague or the Spanish flu. Control efforts consisted largely of face-masking, quarantines, lockdowns, and physical distancing. In the end, unlike the Black Death, it was not the deaths from COVID-19 per se that devastated economies, but rather the restrictions and stringent measures imposed by government to reduce spread. Lockdowns, quarantines, and travel restrictions disrupted global supply chains and had severe economic impacts on the international travel industry, labour-intensive services, food and accommodation, tourism, and the arts and entertainment sectors. Indeed, a one unit increase in the Oxford Stringency Index, which tracks government policy responses to the pandemic based on data from more than 180 countries, was associated with an approximate percentage point drop in real GDP growth of 0.1 percent.

 

Moreover, as noted in a new study published by the Fraser Institute, prolonged levels of stringent government restrictions did not significantly reduce COVID-19 case counts or deaths per million. On the plus side, high rates of testing helped control mortality rates, with each additional 100,000 tests per million associated with 21 fewer COVID-19 deaths per million. And again, countries with larger elderly populations experienced higher COVID-19 mortality rates.

 

Crucially, the number of hospital beds played a key role. Internationally, each additional hospital bed (per 1,000 people) was associated with 31.5 fewer COVID-19 deaths per million. Even among advanced countries, there are substantial variations in bed numbers. In 2020, hospital beds per 1,000 ranged from highs of 13.1 in Japan, 12.2 in South Korea and 8.0 in Germany to lows of 2.5 in Canada and Denmark, 2.4 in Singapore and 2.2 in Sweden.

 

In the end, though all countries experienced the pandemic, its intensity and severity varied as did the economic impact, and there wasn’t always a direct linear relationship between the intensity of the disease and the economic and fiscal impact. Indeed, countries with governments that spent more did not necessarily experience a better outcome in either maintaining their economies or containing the virus.

Clearly, how each country chose to play the cards they were dealt was an important determinant of the health and economic impacts reported during the pandemic’s first year.

COVID-19: China Is Actually Not Hard Hit At All

The international statistics of the COVID-19 outbreak generally show the total number of cases by country and the source of the outbreak - China - has to date the largest total number of cases at 81,218 (as of 12 Noon today from the Worldmeters web site ).  Catching up is Italy with 69,176 cases and in third place is the United States at 59,966 followed by Spain at 47,610.  However, these numbers do not adjust for the vastly different population sizes of these countries which provides a more accurate assessment of the relative impact relative to population size. China after all has over 1 billion people whereas Luxembourg is under 1 million.

Figure 1 plots the top 30 countries in terms of total case numbers by total cases per 1 million population.  The most affected country in terms of cases per 1 million of population is actually Luxembourg at 2,129 cases per 1 million(M) people.  Next, comes Switzerland at 1,217 cases per 1M followed by Italy at 1,144 per 1M, then Spain at 1,018 and then Austria at 620.  The United States comes in 17th place in this ranking at 77 per 1M and Canada 22nd at 77 total cases per 1M.  Where is China? It currently is in 25th place at 56 cases per 1M people.

 

Figure 2 plots the top 30 countries in terms of total case numbers by total deaths per 1M population.  The most deaths per 1M population have occurred in Italy at 113 followed by Spain at 73 and then Iran at 25.  The United States currently stands at 2 deaths per 1M people while Canada comes in at 0.7 deaths per 1M.  As for China?  It ranks 15th virtually tied with the United States at 2 per 1M people.

 

The failure of the Chinese government to properly take initial steps to contain the spread of the virus enabled it to become a very successful export particularly to those countries with very open economies in terms of trade and travel.  That the Chinese government appears to have finally contained the virus within its border is reassuring but the corona virus cat so to speak is now out of the bag.  Europe has borne the brunt of the spread.  As for deaths, Italy and Spain have truly been outliers with very high death rates and why that is the case is indeed an important question as the rest of the world deals with this situation.

That's all for now.

Is the Russia-America Global CoDominium About to Begin?

Well, I had so much fun writing this and posting it on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative that I decided it was worth posting here too!


In the wake of the Putin-Trump Helsinki summit, there is much speculation about what was actually said between Putin and Trump behind closed doors and the uncertainty spread throughout the American government about whether agreements had been reached on issues such as Syria and the Ukraine.  The subsequent invitation to Putin to visit the White house in the fall – probably just before the November elections – has resulted in further uncertainty especially after Putin’s statement that he proposed to Trump holding a referendum to resolve the eastern Ukraine issue.  So, what is really going on here?
Quite frankly, we have all have been scratching our heads as the behaviour in some respects is reminiscent of 18^th and 19^th century monarchs gathering to decide the fate of wide swaths of the world in private meetings.  Putin is an autocrat and Trump is a business autocrat who admires political autocrats, so their personal level diplomacy may indeed be a series of moves designed to remake the world and return it to an age when Russian and American led blocs were the only game in town. Both the Russians and the Americans have seen their political influence decline in a multilateral world led by growing Asia-Pacific economies and both countries have been less than comfortable with the rise of China.
One has to wonder if this is an attempt by Trump to forge some type of private alliance with the Russians in an effort to coordinate their interests and deal with their ebbing international influence? The idea sounds like science fiction.  Indeed, the idea of these two countries getting together and establishing a CoDominium actually has substance in an alternate reality – the science fiction world of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.  In their novel The Mote in God’s Eye, which was originally published in 1974, a series of treaties between the Russians and the Americans establishing the CoDominium in the 1990s sets the stage for a global government and the expansion of the human species out into the galaxy.  This of course would place Trump’s musings about setting up a Space Force into quite an entirely different light. Indeed, is Donald Trump drawing inspiration from a mythical civilization disrupting character known as a Crazy Eddie? 
Trump may be trying to engineer some broader type of Russian-American political alliance to counter their waning influence in the world driven by a nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s.  After all, the rise of the Chinese economy and the growth of Chinese military influence is seen as a potential concern in some circles.  It does not matter how far-fetched the idea may seem given everything else that has been happening lately whenever Donald Trump takes the world stage.  Disrupting the world, wrecking the liberal economic order and creating chaos and then having America and Russia step in to fix things may seem crazy but does it make sense to foreign policy experts?  And, while Trump may be thinking along these lines what is Putin really thinking? I doubt he is a Niven and Pournelle fan.
Of course, one expects that greater formal cooperation between the Americans and the Russians will ultimately require Congress to sign-off especially if actual treaties are eventually negotiated. On the other hand, if it is all kept informal and behind closed doors, who knows what is eventually going to emerge?