As the number of coronavirus cases has grown in the United States -- and is now the highest of any country -- one of the themes of the left is that this increase is the result of the incompetence of President Trump and his administration. Last Sunday, Chuck Todd of NBC asked Joe Biden whether President Trump has “blood on his hands” because of the U.S. failure to properly deal with the coronavirus crisis.

One of the flaws in these claims is they fail to account for the size of the U.S. population in relation to others. The United States is the third-largest country in the world by population, behind only China and India. There are reasons to doubt China’s reports on its management of the virus, and India is just beginning its bout with this deadly disease. In other words, on the basis of population alone, the United States should have one of the highest absolute numbers of coronavirus cases.

Still, the only truly important number in this crisis is the percentage of coronavirus cases that result in death. That number is the only true reflection of how successfully a particular country is dealing with the challenge the virus presents.

According to the Worldometer, a private statistical resource used by Johns Hopkins University, the New York Times and others, as of April 1, the United States had 188,881 cases and 4,066 deaths, for a total fatality rate of 2.15%.

That is the one of the lowest fatality rates among the world’s major developed countries. In the world as a whole, according to Worldometer, by April 1 there had been a total of 884,075 coronavirus cases, resulting in 44,169 fatalities, for a world fatality rate of 4.99%.

This is much higher than the U.S. rate, but the fairest test of the success of the Trump administration would be to compare the U.S. fatality rate to that of other developed counties on the same date. Here is the comparison:

China: 81,554 cases, 3,312 fatalities, for a rate of 4.06%

Italy: 105,792 cases, 12,428 fatalities, for a rate of 11.7%.

Germany: 74,508 cases, 821 fatalities, for a rate of 1.1%

UK: 29,474 cases, 1,789 fatalities, for a rate of 7.95%

South Korea: 9,887 cases, 165 fatalities, for a rate of 1.67%

Switzerland: 17,137 cases, 461 fatalities, for a rate of 2.69%

Thus, the U.S. fatality rate ranks among the lowest of any developed country, bettered only by Germany and South Korea, and well ahead of China, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

In addition, the number of “cases” in the United States does not reflect the total number of people who have contracted the coronavirus but remain asymptomatic and have not sought testing. It’s important to note that the U.S. government has consistently asked those without symptoms not to seek testing, because the priority has been to identify people who may need hospitalization.

Thus, the number of coronavirus “cases” in this country is likely to be substantially larger than the number of people who were actually tested and became “cases” in that way. If people who have been exposed to the virus and are asymptomatic had been tested, that would have driven the U.S. percentage of fatalities far lower.

We do not know, of course, what lies ahead, and most of the data coming in from around the world suggests that the total number of fatalities from the coronavirus will eventually be far lower than the initial projections had indicated.

But as the United States and the world fights this scourge, what we don’t need are politically motivated efforts to cast blame. There will be plenty of time when the current pandemic has run its course to determine which countries were most effective in protecting their populations.