COVID's worst places

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the situation in India with COVID and how bad it was there. It turns out that it's not the worst place in the world to be (though certainly not anywhere near the best either!). There's an interactive map hosted by the New York Times that shows, per country, the rates of infection per capita.

As expected, India and Brazil are doing badly, but there are some countries that are worse. Interestingly, Canada currently has a much higher number of infections per day than the US does - probably as a result of the impressive rollout of the COVID vaccine by the US.

South America, overall, seems to be particularly bad - with Uruguay coming in at an average of 73 new cases daily per 100,000 population.

But almost as bad is Sweden, darling of the Plan B crowd, with 47 daily new cases per 100,000 population.

Of course, the infection rate is just one dimension of the pandemic. The environment in which infections occur and how they're handled and managed makes a major difference to the outcome of cases - and in India's case, their health systems are overloaded resulting in deaths that might have been avoided in countries with better-equipped systems.