re: Daily COVID Updated as of 11/2/20 8:00 PM

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What is the deal with rising cases?

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Everything is opening back up. It would be unreasonable and illogical to think a rise in cases wouldn't come with the economy opening back up. The same thing is happening at a greater scale in Europe, who closed down sooner and longer than we did. Excluding Russia, which encompasses bot Europe and Asia, Europe has a population of about 596 million people. The United States has a population of about 328 million people. Yesterday, Europe (excluding Russia) had 202,658 new cases, while the US had 74,301 new cases. So, in a continent that has 1.8 times the people we do had 2.72 times the number of new cases we had.

Of course, no one in the media wants to focus on the fact that our individual states are comparable to entire countries in Europe. France, alone, had 41,000 new cases yesterday with a population of 66 million people. Our most populous state is California with about 40 million people. California had 4,307 new cases yesterday. Texas, the second most populated state and who had the most new cases yesterday still only had 6,107 new cases (1/9 the number of new cases at about 3/5 the size). So Texas, a state about half the size of France and our state with the most new cases per day right now, only had 1/7 the number of new cases as did France.

At the current rates, I would expect many western, European, advanced economic societies to catch up to our cases per 100MM/population stats very soon unless something drastically changes. And I honestly think the number would show being much closer already if we weren't testing at a rate much higher than anywhere else in the world. We are identifying new cases at a much more rapid rate due to sheer volume of our testing. The democrats seem to think this is a dumb argument that Trump makes, but it's 100% true. When you test a lot more, you identify a lot more positive results. That doesn't mean, in and of itself, we have way more cases. It can also mean we have simply identified more of the positive cases we have than other countries have. Undocumented cases of COVID doesn't mean they don't exist, but a country like France having only tested fewer than 15 million people in a country of 66 million (22.7% of their population) compared to our 130 million tests in our country of 328 million people (39.6% of our population) is going to skew the numbers.