US Tops List of COVID-19 and All-Cause Death Rates Since May

The authors of a new analysis conclude that tens of thousands of lives could have been saved with a more coordinated national response to the coronavirus.

Written byMax Kozlov

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The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the US, with more than 216,000 confirmed deaths attributed to the disease and much of the population still vulnerable to the virus. A new report in JAMA released this week (October 12) compares how 19 countries that have employed different virus response strategies have fared since early May, finding that the US has the highest COVID-19 death rate.

“It’s shocking. It’s horrible,” Ezekiel Emanuel, a former White House health adviser who chairs the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania and a coauthor of the report, tells NPR. “The United States really has done remarkably badly compared to other countries. I mean, remarkably badly.”

Emanuel and his Harvard University colleague looked at COVID-19 death rates through mid-September in 19 countries that have a population greater than 5 million and a gross domestic product of at ...

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Meet the Author

Max Kozlov
Max is a science journalist from Boston. Though he studied cognitive neuroscience, he now prefers to write about brains rather than research them. Prior to writing for The Scientist as an editorial intern in late 2020 and early 2021, Max worked at the Museum of Science in Boston, where his favorite part of the job was dressing in a giant bee costume and teaching children about honeybees. He was also a AAAS Mass Media Fellow, where he worked as a science reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Read more of his work at www.maxkozlov.com.
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