If you had shown me this chart six months ago, and asked me to guess what it means, I would have had no idea.
If you had urged me to just guess, the word “yesterday” in the title notwithstanding, I would have said it must be the number of deaths due to gun violence last year, but I would have been suspicious that the numbers for Japan and Germany were as high as they were.
If you had then told me that the numbers reflected daily infections of a new and highly contagious disease, I would not have believed it.
I would not have been able to reconcile that our country, with a medical establishment (science, research, medical schools) second to none in the world, would have an infection rate of 250 times as bad as Germany or Japan.
With our population being about four times as large as Germany and three times as large as Japan, we can safely divide the rate again by a third and state that we’re about 100 times as bad as those countries.
Then I hear arguments that this is still not real, since we’re testing so much more than other countries right now (which I actually don’t believe and see no evidence of, but that’s another matter to investigate). So let’s say we’re testing twice as much per capita as Germany and Japan. This would reduce the factor from 100 times to about 10 times the rate.
[I really should be using an equation like the Drake equation to show this in more scientific terms, but this ‘back of the napkin calculation’ makes my points]. We’re still off by a factor of 10.
Something is very wrong in Denmark… ahem …in the United States.