Only a Handful of Countries

"Only a handful of countries have suppressed cases from more than 500 a day to near zero."

" When you look at Australia compared to the rest of the world, well frankly there is no comparison, " Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Thursday. ScoMo is correct only in the sense that had he MADE a comparison he would see how fanciful his statement is.

China's population is about fifty-five times that of Australia.

I have culled some data from that interactive chart and placed it in a table. The top-left cell is a multiplier of 55, the ratio of China's population to Australia's.

On Day1 of the reporting period Australia recorded 552 cases, whatever "cases" mean in Australia.

On Day1 of the reporting period China recorded 791 cases, whatever "cases" mean in China.

Of course, large parts of Australia are remote and sparsely settled, and large parts of China are remote and NOT sparsely settled (that's how you fit 1.4 billion people into 3.6 million square miles (against Australia's 25 million people into 3 million square miles ). So how much testing went on in cities like Huìzhou? And how much testing went on in cities like Morowa or Mullewa?

Australia's 552 cases are significantly less than China's 791 cases. But Australia is not at all like China. China has fifty-five times as many people as Australia has, so if we scale up the cases by a factor of 55, Australia's cases would be 30,352.

As a proportion of population, Australia's cases were 0.00221% of Australia's population whereas China's cases were a scant 0.00006%. Seen this way, China is thirty-nine times BETTER than Australia.

And remember, these calculations are based on data provided in the interactive chart.

ScoMo thinks that Australia looks good because the chart says so, but the chart does not take into account the fact that Australia has significantly fewer people to get infected in the first case.

Snap Quiz: How many cases were reported on the island of Rockall, west of Scotland and North of Ireland?

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