Mortality rates per capita are a better indicator of how a country is doing against COVID-19 than rates per confirmed positives, because countries vary in how much they have tested for the virus. Translating “mortality rate per capita” to “mortality rate per million residents” (because the former would give a weird fraction that isn’t immediately relatable), this is what I found:
The obvious question here is whether there is a connection between each country’s government response and its mortality rate. The government response I’m most interested in regards the relationship between stay-at-home lockdowns and mortality rates. Here are the countries* that had full, countrywide, stay-at-home lockdowns: Spain, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Norway. I was tempted to put the US on this list, but some states aren’t on lockdown.
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* With the understanding that correlation is not causation and even if correlation does say something about causation, the direction of causation still has to be sussed out.
** This list is from “Which countries are on lockdown?” by Sunni Upal/The Sun (last updated on April 24) and is consistent with what I read on Wikipedia - except for Germany, which Wikipedia indicated did not go into countrywide lockdown. I checked another source, which confirmed Wikipedia’s account. To quote: “Unlike other European countries, Germany has so far stopped short of ordering its over 80 million population to remain at home — instead opting for strict social distancing measures which were issued on March 22…The states of Bavaria and Saarland have, however, have put their residents on lockdown, telling them to stay at home.”