August 4, 2020

Raw Data: The US Is the 7th Worst Country in the World for COVID-19 Deaths

After hearing Donald Trump blather away about how great the United States has done in its battle with COVID-19—based on a completely meaningless statistic—perhaps you’d like to see how we’re really doing. Here you go:

We are the seventh worst in the world, behind only Belgium, the UK, Peru, Italy, Sweden, and Chile. At the rate we’re going, in a few weeks we’ll probably be the third worst country in the world. And that’s despite a huge and extremely competent health care system.

There was no good reason for this. Maybe we never had the self-discipline and patience to be Germany (109 deaths per million), but even moderately decent leadership could have cut our number in half and had us trending downward instead of heading back up.

Competence matters.

NOTE: For space reasons in the chart, only every third country is labeled. I also deleted tiny statelets.

UPDATE: The original chart was too confusing. It now shows every country, not every third. The downside is that the type is teensy.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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