The worldometer shows us the official figures for virus cases, deaths and population numbers. It seems best to compare cases and deaths per million to get some kind of impression on how countries have fared.
The UK is 29th on the list of cases per million at 87,188. The USA, Brazil, France, Spain, Netherlands, Czechia, Belgium and many others are higher. The UK is 20th in the list of deaths per million, just nine deaths per million more than the USA and well below Peru, Hungary, many of the Balkan countries, Italy, Brazil, Poland and Belgium.
It would be good to hear from the experts why countries like Hungary, Peru and Belgium had such a bad time, whilst Japan at 121 and South Korea at 41 deaths per million have contained it better so far, not to say Taiwan at 33 deaths. Nearer to home how did Luxembourg have such a high figure of 116,000 cases per 1 million, yet with 1293 deaths per million had a low end death rate of 1.1% compared to Poland where it was 2.6% and Hungary 3.7%.
There needs to be analysis of which countries had most success in avoiding cases, and which were best at treating the virus. All this of course will also need work to be done on the figures themselves, as countries adopted different definitions of a covid death and ran very different levels of testing to try to find the infection
Follow this news feed: John Redwood MP