Again:

The 2 million figure was the projection of doing *absolutely nothing*.

"We did better than absolutely inaction" is not much of a defense, particularly with cases still rising. https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1308458028203675648

A fairer way to contextualize: how has the US performed in cumulative deaths per million over time?

By that measure, it's a fiasco.

The US is clearly among the worst performers. Up in the range of UK and Spain at the top of the graph, not down with Germany, South Korea, China near the bottom.

More damningly, most of the Spain/UK deaths came in the initial explosion of their outbreaks, which in their smaller population skews the per-million figure higher.

US death toll came from steady, uncontrolled spread over time.

Here's another way to look at the same data.

This means even poor performers like UK and Spain kept a better handle on deaths through the summer - flat curves - while US just kept rising & rising.

If the US had managed to flatten the death curve as quickly as they did - around day 60 - we'd have *halved* the US death toll.

And of course, 200k dead Americans is not the final word. Cases are rising once again, which means that a rise in deaths will soon follow - and that's before we even get into winter (Spain is also on dangerous course, and UK may be as well).

So on the President's performance, the relevant question isn't "did we out-perform complete inaction?"

It's: why are we among the worst-performing countries rather than the best? And why did even the worst performers manage to flatten their death tolls when we couldn't?

*better than *absolute* inaction

argh twitter needs to let us edit