The COVID-19 pandemic

[tomh009]

Not perfect, but some countries much better than others. Canada is sort of lower mid pack, but there are definitely countries that have done far worse. Greece for instance did relatively well. I think that countries which were scared of their health system not being able to cope actually went a lot harder and did better. (Greece has about two-thirds the population of Ontario and has a 7-day average of 826 vs Ontario's average of 1657; total cases for Ontario 277k, Greece 160k).

So, let's look at not-tiny high-income countries (including EU countries), and group into rough buckets based on the number of cases per million (since last year -- looking at current data is not right as the timing of the waves has varied greatly), in decreasing order of number of cases per million:

• 80K+: Montenegro, Czech Republic, Slovenia, USA
  
• 60K-80K: Portugal, Israel, Lithuania, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland
  
• 40K-60K: Netherlands, Sweden, Croatia, UK, France, Slovakia, Austria, Italy, Poland
  
• 20K-40K: Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Denmark, Bulgaria, Germany, Canada
  
• 10K-20K: Iceland, Greece, Norway
  
• 5K-10K: Finland
  
• -5K: Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan
  

Apart from Asia-Pacific countries, only Greece and (most of) the Nordic countries have fewer cases per million. So, personally, I would not characterize this as "lower mid-pack", as much as we love to slam our politicians. 

Data source:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/