Health and Healthcare
Bing COVID-19 Tracker Report 5/14/2020 (6:46 AM) Third World Cases Too Low?
Published:
According to the Bing COVID-19 Tracker, the number of global cases has reached 4,347,015. Active cases hit 2,501,271, which is 29,867 higher than yesterday. Recovered cases rose by 55,097 to 1,548,547, far outpacing the rise in active cases. Deaths number 297,197, up by 5,236. At the current pace, deaths worldwide will reach 300,000 today.
Total COVID-19 confirmed cases in the United States have hit 1,421,061, which is 33% of the world’s total. The number of active cases increased by 14,059 to 1,092,781, while recovered cases hit 243,517, higher by 6,261. So, active cases rose at a rate of over two times that of recovered cases. And fatal cases in America hit 84,763, a gain of 1,681 in a day, and 28% of the world’s total.
Does the United States Really Have a Third of the World’s COVID-19 Cases?
As mentioned above, official numbers show that the United States has 1,421,061 confirmed cases, while the global confirmed cases count is 4,347,015. That gives the United States 32.7% of the world’s sum.
Is the figure plausible? Almost certainly not. Why?
The world has a population of 7.784 billion people, while the U.S. population is 329 million. That is 4.2% of the global total.
The majority of the world’s confirmed cases are in five countries: United States (1,421,061), Spain (271,095), Russia (252,245), United Kingdom (229,705) and Italy (222,104). Together, these countries have 55% of the confirmed cases in the world. Each has relatively sophisticated diagnostic systems and a central government infrastructure that can gather health data.
Contrast these figures to these five developing countries, which are among the 10 most populated nations in the world. India has a population of 1,366,417,754, Indonesia 270,625,568, Pakistan 216,565,318, Nigeria 200,963,599 and Bangladesh 163,046,161. Yet the official confirmed case count across these five countries is just 153,627.
There are two explanations for their extremely low counts.
The first is that COVID-19 has barely spread to these five countries at all. That means almost no one with the disease has crossed their borders. Their crowded cities have few infected people to touch off a sharp rise in those ill with the disease.
Alternatively, the cases of COVID-19 infections are extremely undercounted in these five countries. That is due to poor data collection infrastructure, relative primitive diagnostics and central governments that are, in some cases, in turmoil or, at the very least, unstable.
There is a chance that the confirmed cases among these nations could be undercounted by hundreds of thousands.
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