President Donald Trump constantly claims that the New Zealand eruption is really bad the Covid-19 eruption – even though America’s own epidemic, by any measure, is completely New Zealand tensions.
Trump, at a press conference on Wednesday, brought up New Zealand again: “New Zealand, by the way, had a big outbreak, and other countries that were kept trying to make us not as good as we should look, because we did an incredible job.”
This follows Trump’s previous remarks on Monday about New Zealand, in which he called the outbreak of the country “terrible” and claimed that, in an attempt to make him feel bad, he criticized his critics of New Zealand, among other countries, “and now and again say, ‘Whoops.’ ”
Given the strangeness of Trump’s fixation on New Zealand, this is also not a comparison that Trump should make. According to Our World in Data, New Zealand reported five new Covid-19 cases in their last day of data; the US reported nearly 50,000.
Even in terms of population control, the US has done a much, much worse job than New Zealand, as this diagram from 91-DIVOC shows:
91-DIVOC
This is true around the developed world. Whether it is compared to Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, or New Zealand, the US continues to have a much worse outbreak of Covid-19 than its developed peers. While other developed countries (especially in parts of Europe) had poor initial outbreaks, they have gained more control since their epidemics. The ongoing outbreak of the US is only comparable to that of countries with much weaker government institutions and public health systems, especially those in Latin America.
I have asked experts why this is: What has the US failed so catastrophically?
They warned that the US was always likely to have a hard time, given the great size, the fragmented federalist system of the country and the libertarian region. The public health system was already underperforming and underprepared for a major disease outbreak.
However, many other developed countries deal with this type of problem as well. Public health systems are notoriously funded worldwide. Australia, Canada and Germany, among others, also have federalist systems of government, individualistic societies, or both.
What really makes the US different, experts said, is Trump’s leadership – as well as its lack thereof. Time and time again in the midst of the whole pandemic, Trump has gone against the advice of even his own experts on public health. He pushed the country to open too soon. He suggested that the US was actually doing too many tests. He downplayed the (now proven) benefits of masks, claiming that some people wore masks to keep him going.
This set up a situation in which the US as a whole did essentially nothing good in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. That set America apart from its developed peers, who did not always do everything perfectly, but typically did at least one thing well. New Zealand, for example, did not include widespread masking, but it did include an extremely rigorous testing system – with more than 500 tests for each positive case, compared to America’s subpar 13 tests per positive case.
“Although there is variation in many countries, the thing that differentiates the countries well is that it does well,” he said. eat seriously, ”said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
The result is that New Zealand, and other developed countries, have actually done much better than the US – despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.
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