India’s Covid outbreak continues to set records, but here are the countries where the pandemic is even worse.
(Originally published May 24 in “What in the World“) India seems to have fought its way to the backside of its recent, horrific outbreak, yet that hasn’t stopped the misleading coverage of its still-astounding statistics. India just surpassed 300,000 Covid-related deaths, a number widely considered a dramatic undercount of the actual toll. Even if India’s victims were double the official count, however, they would only slightly exceed the number of Americans who have lost their lives to the virus. On a per-capita basis, India’s death toll remains only about 1/8th that of the United States. Covid also remains far more pervasive in the U.S. than in India, with roughly 17,000 active infections per million people against India’s 2,000. India is now racking up new infections faster than, the U.S. where falling infections have given way to a mood of celebration. Records fall easily in a country of more than a billion people.
Here’s a chart of just how prevalent the pandemic has been in both, relative to the size of of their respective populations (France and Brazil are also included for perspective, all figures here from Worldometers):
And just for fun, here’s a chart of new infections calculated as a one-week rolling average:
As noted earlier, counting active infections can be slippery given that many of those who test positive may be sent home with no follow-up, resulting in a seemingly persistent case rate. But even if we limit ourselves to the number of new confirmed cases being counted over a two-week period (still the best bet of Covid’s infectious period), India is by no means where the pandemic is worst. According to the very useful tables compiled by the Guardian, here’s where the virus is infecting residents even more rapidly, ranked by highest infection rate:
Maldives
Seychelles
Bahrain
Uruguay
Argentina
Costa Rica
Sweden
Cabo Verde
Trinidad and Tobago
Paraguay
Lithuania
Colombia
Brazil
Chile
Georgia
Nepal
Latvia
Netherlands
Suriname
Kuwait
Note that two of the worst-hit nations—the Maldives and the Seychelles—opened up to visitors despite still facing a high rate of cases. Now many more on this list are also opening up—ostensibly Lithuania and the Netherlands—as the EU opens to innoculated travelers.
And here’s the really depressing part, a list of countries were Covid is killing residents more quickly than in India. Notice how most of the top-ranked countries are in South America and how many are in the EU, including Greece, which is trying to lure tourists back to its sunny isles:
Uruguay
Paraguay
Argentina
Colombia
Brazil
Peru
Trinidad and Tobago
Antigua and Barbuda
Croatia
North Macedonia
Hungary
Nepal
Georgia
Maldives
Poland
Bahrain
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Seychelles
Ukraine
Costa Rica
Greece
Tunisia
Bulgaria
Bolivia
Chile
Latvia
Ecuador
Suriname
Lithuania
Honduras
Armenia
Montenegro
Romania
Slovakia
Guyana
Iran