40,000+ US COVID-19 deaths in May; Swedish model looking ever worse

May brought no solace to the world, or to conservative claims about COVID-19. Another 40,000 deaths in the United States put the lie to Trump's claim that the country is doing great, while he simultaneously takes no responsibility for his weeks and weeks of denial and downplaying the pandemic. The U.S. death toll now stands at over 106,000. Sweden, for the first time in its modern history the darling of conservatives, shot up the chart in terms of its death rate. Conservative-run United Kingdom did almost as badly as Sweden in May.

Country	DPM May 1	DPM June 1	DPM Increase
Belgium	665	819	+ 154
Spain	531	580	+   49
United Kingdom	405	575	+ 170
Italy	467	554	+   87
France	377	442	+   65
Sweden	263	436	+ 173
Netherlands	286	348	+   62
Ireland	256	334	+   78
United States	199	323	+ 124
Switzerland	203	222	+   19
DPM = deaths per million
Worldometers.info

The 10* worst-performing countries by deaths per million have remained the same over the last month, but their ranking has changed. As noted in an update to my last post on the pandemic, the United States passed Switzerland on May 3. At current rates, it will pass Ireland and the Netherlands in coming weeks, and Ireland will also pass the Netherlands. Over the course of May, Sweden quickly passed the Netherlands and left it in the dust. It will pass France soon. The United Kingdom leapfrogged Italy and is set to take the #2 spot from Spain within a week.

As I mentioned last time (link above), while conservatives have lauded Sweden's refusal to go for a hard lockdown, we can see that Sweden had the highest increase in deaths per million people over the last month. Now, instead of having 64 more deaths per million than the United States, the gap has grown to 113 per million. That would equate to an extra 37,380 deaths if the United States were doing as poorly as Sweden.

The global toll is worse still. Not only are there now 377,000 deaths worldwide, but the number of new daily infections shows a fairly steady increase since April 1, rising from about 75,000 new cases globally per day then to about 100,000 new cases per day on June 1. In the same period, daily deaths have fallen from about 5,000 to 3,000. Unfortunately, deaths are a lagging indicator, and the epidemic is now revving up in developing countries such as Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador. The latter has already risen to #12 with 194 deaths per million officially, and a New York Times analysis on April 23 suggested that the true death toll was 15 times higher as hospitals had been overwhelmed and the dead were overflowing the country's emergency rooms and morgues.

As if all this isn't bad enough, Trump fiddles pours on the gasoline as the U.S. burns, in an attempt to consolidate his dictatorship now, before elections interfere with his project. I'll be writing about this very soon.


* Excluding microstates (San Marino, Andorra) and dependencies (Sint Maarten, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Montserrat).