Why is Europe improving on the battle against COVID-19, but the US is just getting worse at it?

On July 24th, the US took a turn for the worse. From that week on, the US has getting worst and worst, almost doubling the fatality rate

Let me just share a question that started to bug me a few weeks ago: “Doesn’t it seem strange that the US is reporting average daily COVID-19 deaths in the high hundreds while infection figures keep dropping?”

This is a fairly long question, but sums some discussions I’ve been reading around, unfortunately commonly tainted by politics.

First, let’s look at what the context. Over the past two months, the US has reported ever lower figures of new infections, and this effect was especially visible on the last couple of weeks, as we can check on the chart above. What is most striking is that on Europe, things are heating up, with new cases popping up literally on every single country, and at very significant rates.

On some European countries, like Spain or France, the figure are fast approaching the dreadful scenario from the months of April and May, with infections beating 10 thousand infections per day, and deaths exceeding a hundred in some days. For other countries, like Czechia or Denmark, the number of new infections are simply the greatest since the pandemic started, one day after the other.

And yet, at the end of the day, Europe has fewer deaths than the US, every day. This begs for a chart.

Oh yes… this is one of those cases where a picture is worth more than a thousand words (well, 228 until now).

Europe struggled very hard with the pandemic, and peaked between late April and early May. At that stage hospitals were completely packed in some countries, with patients lying in the corridors in Madrid and some Italian cities. Others were simply airlifted to other countries where spare capacity existed, led by Germany.

In sum, Europe was caught completely off guard, unprepared, under stocked, and it cost them of thousands of lives.

Then, Europe learned, the hard way, how to fight the virus. Lock downs, first national, then local. Sometimes at neighbourhood level. What ever did the trick. And since May 8th, when Europe’s case fatality rate reached its peak, it was been down, always down. And it continues to decrease, even as the number of infections are now on the rise, as people get back to their jobs after (paid) vacations, or back to the office from telecommuting for the past months, or taking their kids to school. It’s not like everything seems to be running perfect, but it’s working good enough.

Comes the US, and something happened on the week of July 24th. On July 24th, the US took a turn for the worse. From that week on, the US has getting worst and worst, almost doubling the fatality rate. Well, is not like the disease become deathlier in a week. But the fact of the matter is simple. The US is now reporting far less infections than in July, but the number of those infected that are dying is now higher than in Europe, and almost twice the number reported in July.

One can say, “Just wait for it. Europe is just waiting for the dead to appear”. That may be the case, but that’s not the issue. The issue is “Why has the US allowed more infected to die than before”?

The first suspect would be obvious: is the US simply testing a lot less? This question would undoubtedly cause accusations of political bias by itself. But no. That’s not the case, at least accordingly to official figures. The US and the UK are testing more people than any other country, per capita. Coincidently, or not, both countries are reporting some of the lowest positivity rates in the world.

The US and the UK have something in common. Any attempt to track and trace the infected have utterly failed, or was not even attempted. This bares a consequence and a grave one: you’re testing the wrong people. It’s useless to test millions of people per week, if only a few handful of those were actually in contact with other infected people. The virus doesn’t transmits overs large distances not over surfaces. You need to be within close contact with an infected to become infected. Is doesn’t need to be inches a way, nor for hours, but you need to be near someone, for some time.

And this is where Europe is winning the war. Europe is now reporting what it appears to be the second wave, and it’s suffering from its lack of centralised command and control, and the growing number of those rejecting the usage of face masks. But by keeping a close track of the infected and it’s contacts, it’s able to detect more of the infected, and tell them to get home, even before having symptoms, and definitely before infected tens or hundreds around.

Falling to track the infected is an exercise of futility and resources, which should be used to buy ventilators. Lots of them.