The bad news: Over a million Chinese died in the latest Covid wave. The worse news: The US per capita death rate is still 3 times China’s
This article in the NY Times tries to answer the question, “How Deadly Was China’s Covid Wave?” This question needs to be asked, since the official number is a ridiculously low 83,150 (for the whole pandemic, although the number before this wave was less than 10,000). Based on four different models, experts estimated that between 970,000 and 1.6 million people died of Covid during the wave (which has now subsided). Of course, this is bad, but what’s most revealing is a chart comparing some major world countries for their Covid death rates per 100,000 population. China is about in the middle of this list, with either 68 or 110 deaths per 100,000 population (those are based on the low and high estimates of the recent wave, respectively). And which country is at the top? You got it: the US with 337 deaths per 100,000 population, followed closely by Brazil with 330 deaths. Speaking of US deaths, I just noticed (since I didn’t update my numbers last week) that Covid deaths were ab