[custom_adv] According to a new PBS report, the U.S. accounts for about 4% of the world’s population, but has eclipsed other nations in coronavirus cases by more than 9 million, and in COVID-19 deaths by over 151,000. [custom_adv] As 2020 ground to an end, the United States endured the most deadly days of the pandemic. New records were set on both Wednesday and Thursday, when the daily count rose to 3,744. That’s up over 1,000 daily deaths from early December. [custom_adv] Responding successfully means two things: limiting the direct and the indirect impact of the pandemic. Countries that have responded most successfully were able to avoid choosing between the two: they avoided the trade-off between a high mortality and a high socio-economic impact of the pandemic. New Zealand has been able to bring infections down and open up their country internally. [custom_adv] Other island nations were also able to almost entirely prevent an outbreak (like Taiwan, Australia, and Iceland). But not only islands were able to bend the curve of infections and prevent large outbreaks – Norway, Uruguay, Thailand, Finland, and South Korea are examples. These countries suffered a smaller direct impact, but they also limited the indirect impacts because they were able to release lockdown measures earlier. [custom_adv] First it was China. Then Italy, then the United States and Russia. After that it was the U.S., Brazil and India. As the hot spots of the coronavirus epidemic move and grow, the death toll rises. [custom_adv] Estimates of excess deaths can provide information about the burden of mortality potentially related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including deaths that are directly or indirectly attributed to COVID-19. [custom_adv] Excess deaths are typically defined as the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods. This visualization provides weekly estimates of excess deaths by the jurisdiction in which the death occurred. Weekly counts of deaths are compared with historical trends to determine whether the number of deaths is significantly higher than expected.
