Colby Cosh
For the most up-to-date COVID-19 information from the Canadian government please visit Canada.ca/COVID19
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On Monday, a reader, Max Anderson of Vancouver, wrote in to observe that, at this point in the COVID-19 epic, Canada does not appear to be doing so well by the developed world’s standards at preventing coronavirus deaths. The case isn’t complicated. It involves looking beyond the United States for comparisons, always a difficult optical exercise for Canadians.
Consider the OECD, the 37-member club of high-income liberal democracies. If you pull the COVID-19 death rates for these countries off of Wikipedia, you find a vast range of figures. Lucky Australia, as I write this, reports 4 fatalities per million residents; Japan and New Zealand are also at 4, with Slovakia and South Korea at 5. At the high end, Belgium, known to be liberal in its definition of a “COVID-19 death”, tops the table with 688 deaths per million. Spain is at 540, Italy at 483, and the U.K. in fourth place at 433.
But the median rate for the OECD countries is just 42 deaths per million, and Canada is at 99. So we probably shouldn’t feel smug because the U.S. stands at 209. Maybe we should be angry. Well, a lot of us are angry anyway.....