As I am writing this, something that I never thought would be the case has become the case. The United States has overtaken China in total number of coronavirus cases. Today is March 30th, and the stark differences of the handling of the outbreak in China as compared to the United States is the clear reason as to why the US numbers just keep skyrocketing. According to the WHO’s daily coronavirus statistics reports the United States currently has 122,653 total cases, and 19,332 “new” cases. The WHO defines a “new” case as one occurring within the last 24 hours. Meanwhile China currently has a total of 82,447 cases, just 106 of those being “new” cases. Now, to me, something about the handling of this virus in the US seems very off, because China has more than three times as many people as the US does, and yet, they have far fewer cases than we do. Yes, don’t get me wrong, China still has a lot of cases, currently they rank third in the world for most cases behind Italy, and the US. However, in a country in which the outbreak began, and that has over 1 billion people, keeping the case count that low is quite impressive to me. Our two countries have taken very different approaches to this catastrophe. China and president Xi have taken a hardcore approach, locking down everything they could as soon as they could to keep everyone indoors and got the necessary testing out as often and as numerous as they could. Meanwhile president Trump has said things like the virus was a hoax, and he along with many lawmakers have not taken this virus seriously, and as a result, we not only have overtaken China, we are the world leaders in coronavirus cases. The WHO daily situation reports can be found here
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One reply on “The US has more active COVID-19 cases than China”
Thanks for sharing your feedback on this. However, this made me think of our exercise on finding credible sources and making sure we have the full information before drawing a conclusion. Although the numbers from WHO indicate China has lower number of cases, there are several investigations being conducted in China that indicate China’s reports are almost certainly inaccurate. Many different countries question the validity of China’s reports. There is little confirmed evidence on how or when the virus started in China. However, the C.I.A. has confirmed that China has vastly understated the number of cases in the country. The C.I.A. has told the White House not to trust the numbers China is providing to the WHO. Although no complete picture of the virus exists anywhere and the situation changes daily, it is important to get as holistic of an understanding as possible. I looked at several different articles for this post, many of which are popular press articles. Typically, popular press and media articles is not my go-to for high-quality information. However, when compiling this information it helps to provide a more complete picture and no official organizations (besides the White House) have reported on China investigations. This article from New York Times sites the CIA and the White House, which adds to its credibility.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/politics/cia-coronavirus-china.html