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I wrote above that the government’s management of the coronavirus appears incompetent, and it does, except for the fact that the crisis shows no signs of remotely approaching a scale that justifies the emergency measures that have been taken. At time of writing, in a country of 38 million, we have 37 deaths from about 3,800 identified cases. The public health system is sufficiently sophisticated that if there were significantly more fatalities from this cause, they would have been identified, even if our testing capacity is inadequate to be confident that there is not a larger number of infected people. Of advanced countries with reliable statistics, only Germany has a lower percentage of fatalities among reported cases, about half of one per cent, and the United Sates, which in medical terms is demographically similar to Canada and leads the world in testing, about half a million people by late Thursday, comes third, with 1.4 per cent of cases resulting in fatalities.

If Germany, Canada and the United States are the leaders in limiting mortal coronavirus cases, the Netherlands and the United States are the hero-nations of public policy. The Dutch have refused to be spooked and have not seriously tried to reduce travel or rights of assembly, or attendance at schools and workplaces, though they are trying to protect the elderly and unwell. Yet their fatality percentages are almost exactly the same as France’s, which is on shut-down imposed by the armed forces. The Dutch are reporting only one per cent more fatalities over confirmed cases than the U.K., and two per cent less than Spain and 4.5 per cent below Italy. The Imperial College of Medicine (London) projections that were so widely circulated a few weeks ago, of 500,000 deaths in Great Britain and 2.2 million in the U.S., have been revised downwards by over 95 per cent, in line with the changing public health responses in those countries. Even that reduced level of expected fatalities is surely an exaggeration. There is a case to be made for draconian measures to reduce the overall number of infections and thus deaths, but putting the entire economy into abeyance and immuring the population rather than focusing on the vulnerable may cause more harm than good. America’s status as a hero pandemical nation rests on the administration’s brilliant relief package, which will actually make this crisis a profitable experience for most of those economically affected by it (in an election year), and for pushing for an end to the current social distancing measures, at least in parts of the country, by Easter, April 12. By then the U.S. will have tested over two million people, and all advanced countries should soon have sample indications of the percentage of people who have had the coronavirus without reporting, or possibly even knowing it.