When the United States on Thursday overtook the rest of the world in reported cases of the coronavirus, it immediately drew international headlines. While technically true, this is a misleading metric because when those numbers are adjusted for population, the U.S. does not actually have close to the most cases.
Before going further, it’s worth offering a few caveats. Comparing international data at this point is tricky. Since the virus hit different countries at different times, not all countries are on the same point in the curve, meaning some countries that are trailing now can more than catch up in the weeks and months ahead. Furthermore, not all countries have the same metrics for reporting cases, nor do they all test at the same rate or administer tests with the same reliability.
In other cases, particularly the authoritarian regimes of Iran and China, there is serious reason to doubt whether they are truthfully reporting cases. In a five-week period from Jan. 23 to Feb. 29, China reported that the number of cases rose from 920 to nearly 80,000. It now expects the world to believe that its growth in new cases has essentially flat-lined and is now at just 81,782. This is in no way plausible or consistent with other more credible countries, such as South Korea, that have seen their curves flatten in a much more gradual way.
But, for the sake of this exercise, I took the raw case counts from the Johns Hopkins University database for the top 10 countries, and then I adjusted those same countries for the U.S. population.
So, for instance, on a raw basis, there are 83,507 reported cases of the coronavirus in the U.S., compared with 80,589 in Italy. But the U.S. has about 5.5 times the population of Italy. If Italy were scaled up to the U.S. population, it would have the equivalent of 443,237 cases.
Among the same 10 countries, the U.S. would actually rank seventh instead of first. (To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean the U.S. is seventh in the entire world because I only did adjustments for 10 countries, not for all 175 countries and regions with confirmed cases).
This isn’t to say that the coronavirus isn’t a serious threat in the U.S., particularly in New York City. There are reasons to fear the strain on the medical system if things continue on their current trajectory. That said, comparing overall cases without the context of population isn’t terribly useful for understanding what is happening.
