Engineer_abroad

i would look more here
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
excess deaths provide a bit more of a normalization against different testing rates and reporting of Covid deaths

dbd33

I take your point but believe excess death rates to be reliable in only a few countries. Still, that'll soon be the only measure for the US so it might be as well to standardize on it.


Charts with the countries filled in:

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-dea...SA~BRA~NZL~GBR

same trends as the first chart I linked to. Death rates, however measured, falling except in three countries.

Stumpylegs

Playing with that data can make for some interesting reading. Change that to cases rather than deaths, change it to per million people and unalign the start dates - so it gives a picture of what percentage of people are getting infected each day currently. Apart from Brazil,USA and Russia who have high figures currently,everyone else seems to be running at a 0.002% or below chance of being infected each day, so actually in the UK, France, Germany, Canada etc there is less than a 1 in 50,000 of you catching the virus today, granted in Britain its more like 1 in 60,000 compared to 1 in 100,000 in Canada, but you've got more chance on average of catching the virus in Canada than you have Germany, Italy or France currently (France and Italy haven't had brilliant success and Germany have got local lockdowns back in place)

Obviously this only works for countries with mass testing in place, But if the data is accurate it would appear that aside from crossing out Moscow, Rio and Florida off the summer holiday list - most places are pretty much equally safe at the moment.

dbd33

Comparing infections has a raft of problems related to testing rates and reporting accuracy, it's like trying to compare violent crime; interesting but inconclusive. Death is better in both cases as there's less wiggle room and, indeed, less wiggling. There's also an issue in that the populated part of Canada, say, Niagara to Montreal, has a similar population density to the UK while most of the country is empty; there's not a lot of danger of catching any infectious disease in the NWT so as the would be immigrant suggested earlier, comparing the rate for the whole country doesn't quite work.