OT Coronavirus: America in chaos, News and Updates. One million Americans dead and counting

From briefly looking at the data I don't think there is any country that's as exceptionally an outlier statistically as the US seems to be at this point with the data we have. I did not say there arent other outliers though.
I'm not sure what the reasons are for that, but I think it's important to figure out why we are such outliers, whether it's just "leadership" or compounding issues, bad data, whatever it is. My entire point was something is obviously off with what our current "numbers" show. I know that it's easy / popular to just say, "Trump" did it, but I don't personally think that's a completely fair assessment of the whole picture and certainly not a very scientific one. I'm not discounting at all how he and his decisions and the political leaders in the US made decisions that were detrimental or could have been for us because I personally think that most of them do things detrimental to us on a regular basis.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/katu.c...nts-infected-with-coronavirus-osu-study-finds

3.4% of Newport residents infected with coronavirus, OSU study finds

 

And all those are fair game IMO, but I absolutely wonder what history will show us if we make it far enough to look at it with a clearer picture and more data. Cause it's strange enough to me that if I was looking at the worlds data, I don't know how much stock I'd put in the United States' numbers from a statistics POV.

 

lol...didn't say that either, did I?

But I'm not at all surprised that you totally dodged the very simple and very direct question...how typical.

 

Cause in data science extreme outliers are often not used, not because they aren't "real", but because they usually reflect variables that were drastically outside the norm, and the outliers should be studied separately. Least that's how it's always been taught to me.

 

Think of it this way. If you have a data outlier that doesn't mean it's "fake", or that it "needs" to fall in line with other data. Just that it is usually handled independently or in some cases tossed aside for whatever reason. There are a number of algorithms for finding outliers for a reason, such as Boxplotting, IQR, univariate, multivariate, etc. Because isolating them is an important part of understanding how to use data. I haven't actually done any analysis on the data, but looking at charts and such the US does seem to be on an extreme, and I guess to me the question is why, and as you and @andalusian have pointed out your theories for why, I'm not arguing that those are all false. Just that I will be really interested in what the picture looks like when we look back on it. I think it's actually very important to figure those out with math and science rather than our theories and feelings so we can handle things better in the future. It could just be, "Trump" did it, which is a roundabout way of saying it was a series of bad decisions by Trump, but it could very well be a lot of things and I'm sure there are people looking at it already, but we probably won't know for a few years, and even then since you can't really test hypotheticals with 100% accuracy it'll be theories but we can still learn from them.

 

I honestly do not think that the US is an outlier when you convert it to a logarithmic scale. You can see the countries that did not have strong leadership / regulations (USA, Brazil), a country like Italy that was hit hard but when they figured it out - their cases go down, Germany which was not as quick to regulate but did it successfully, and a country that was very quick with regulation and had a lot of success, but was mistaken to ease regulations too early because of their early success (Israel).

 

The numbers posted earlier and I found in other places sure looked like outliers. Obviously that's only 5 countries, but if the rest of the world looks like Israel / Germany / Italy. Wouldn't that just mean there are two outliers? We can say it's leadership/culture/regulations if you'd like.

 

It was an observation based on your comment.

 

Denmark did the best job in Europe of containing the virus...So far Denmark, Taiwan and New Zealand are the leading examples....the biggest reason is they were quick to shut down and instantly tested and did backtracing for all infected ….Italy and France have the worst record in the beginning...

 

There are for example other outliers too. Indonesia, 4th highest population in the world. Tests per 1m under 3k? There numbers could be artificially low right? It's not just the US that is an outlier in certain areas.

 

Ok, so then I guess we can stop posting how the "US" is doing against other countries then? Because it's irrelevant in your view. My initial response was literally talking about how the US is doing compared to the world in population vs cases. If it doesn't matter because we're already focused on just the US then really US cases vs the world cases isn't a significant data point right? The thing is it is a significant data point and that's what makes it interesting, what's gained by identifying the US is an outlier is that we can figure out why and make educated responses to it. If you don't know your an outlier to begin with you'll just keep doing it, and in this case whatever, "it" is seems to not be working.

 

Well, the US is an anomaly by being a very big, highly populated, technologically advanced, freedom based entity with many sub-entities with their own flavor within it. The only other entity that shares these characteristics is either Europe or the EU - I have decided it would be more fair to the US to compare it to Europe at large, but if we compare it to the EU only the US will look even worse.

So, the alternative is to check it against other countries and I certainly chose to look at the regulations and provisions done to combat the pandemic and thus wanted to look at 2 countries where leadership by default went against science and just assumed it would let it go, 1 that was pretty vigilant the entire way (Germany, but I could have chosen South Korea or New Zealand instead) and one that started slow but became active later (Italy) vs. one that started fast but became lax later (Israel). So, these (which were selected systematically because they were ones that allowed me to check my assumption that it was government action that determined the pandemic spread) certainly correlate with the theory.

Is it the right theory? I am sure that it is not even close to it as this is a much more complicated issue and I am but a humble keyboard warrior that need some time off from concentrating on the problem I am really trying to fix today, but following occam's razor given what I have read about the pandemic does not throw any wrench into this assumption. I would say that it looks more likely than not - that the Trump's administration series of misguided mistakes is what has caused us to be that outlier that we see when we look at the raw numbers.

If I were appointed emperor tomorrow - first thing I would do is go against the Trump doctrine of dealing with the pandemic and try to emulate the countries that had the equivalent of a rigorous federal response.

 

Sure, that's why I like to see what modern, rich, technology capable countries do and compare against them. I am not sure that we can really learn that much at this point from a country where the GDP per capita is 1/20 of the USA. Makes a lot more to look compared to Germany where the GDP per capita is 3/4 of the USA, even Brazil has about 5 times the GDP per capita of Indonesia

 

One Emperor to another, what could go wrong? heh

 

Hey, I can descend a ramp and do not have a twitter account, so we might be just a little bit ahead...

 

That does seem to be in the ballpark of needed qualifications to be in office in America.