Here’s a surprising fact: The death rate from Covid-19 has been 100 to 1,000 times higher in the U.S. and Europe than in parts of Asia and Africa. At the time of writing, Vietnam, with 95 million people and 1/20th of America’s per-capita income, has had zero Covid-19 deaths, even though it borders China and is economically intertwined with it. Death rates per million people in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, and African countries including Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Uganda are in the single digits; in Europe and the U.S., they are in the triple digits.
