US Covid-19 Rankings: Cases #1; Deaths #1; Fatality #78; Deaths/capita #12. What do these numbers mean?

Cases: WE'RE NUMBER 1, WE'RE NUMBER 1!. We are a big country. Only China and India have more people. But we have more cases than both, and both are over three times larger. Raw tallies don't tell us much.

Deaths: Size is not the answer here either. We are again #1. Our death rates per capita are eight times India's and 214 times China's. (Even if China lies about its statistics by tenfold the ratio is 140:1; no bragging rights here.)

Fatality: Here we do a little better, but we're in 78th place; scores of countries are doing better. Our world class hospitals are saving lots of lives, but the pace of infection overwhelmed the Mid-Atlantic states in April and the same is happening now across the country, notably in states that resisted so-called "lockdown" measures.

Cases/capita: Only Belgium leads the US.

Deaths/capita: Belgium, Peru, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico and the United Kingdom, in that order, have more deaths per capita. If we had our own house in order, we could help our sister republics. That would, of course, give the lie to the Administration's constant denigration of the other peoples of the hemisphere.

The clear lesson in all this is that we have been well served by our medical establishment but poorly served by our so-called system of public health, a federal-state complex that has been essentially starved by the Trump administration intellectually, financially and organizationally. The poor showing is a result of lack of concern and understanding, coupled with incompetence, and history will not be kind. (I've tried to limit the preaching to this one paragraph. 'Tain't easy. I'd have preached only to the choir, but too many are dead.)

Note: I have not compiled statistics for countries with outcomes better than the US on at least one measure or for countries with less than 10,000,000 inhabitants.

Data & statistics spreadsheet