The virus has been going on for a while, and a number of countries have been hard hit but are now successful in containing it, some contained it early on and were never hard hit, some have been less successful, and some really have not contained the virus. Let us look at some mortality rates from a few selected countries:
UK (44K/67M): 0.07% or 1 out of every 1,523 people
Spain (28K/47M): 0.06%
Italy (35K/60M): 0.06%
France (30K/67M): 0.04%
USA (129K/330M): 0.04% or 1 out of every 2,558 people
Canada (8.7K/38M): 0.02%
Germany (9K/83M): 0.01%
Japan (1K/136M): 0.0007%
.
These include seven of the ten richest countries in the world.
A few others of note:
Belgium (9.8K/11.5M): 0.08% or 1 out of every 1,173 people
Holland (6.1K/17.5M): 0.03%
.
Australia (0.1K/26 M): 0.0004%
New Zealand (0.02K/5M): 0.0004%
.
Sweden (5.4K/10.3M): 0.05% or 1 out of every 1,907 people
Denmark (0.6K/5.8M): 0.01%
Norway (0.25K/5.4M): 0.005%
Finland (0.3K/5.5 M): 0.005%
This is all based upon Johns Hopkins CSSE reports. Deaths are rounded to the nearest thousand. Population data is from estimates for either late 2019 or mid-2020 (courtesy of Wikipedia) and rounded to the nearest million. For some countries, there are questions about the accuracy of their statistics, although I don’t think the data from any of these countries are in much doubt. All of these countries are wealthy, developed economies with democratic governance and a free press. I do think there is a difference of interpretation between cause of deaths between say Germany and Belgium, which may be part of the difference between their rates. This will need to be addressed by a study on “excess mortality.”
The mortality rates of most of these countries are not going to increase by much more because they have mostly brought the virus under control. This is not the case for Sweden and the United States.
The graph of the daily cases for the U.S. is:
In contrast, Italy is: