Live Free and Die

I don’t know whether to be embarrassed or ashamed. How did my country come to equate wearing a face mask with losing freedom?

Protesters at a county health department hearing in Missouri rallied against a proposed face mask requirement being considered by the department board. A prominent poster read “Hitler required compliance too.” The protest was reminiscent of a similar hearing at the Palm Beach County, Florida Commission on a proposed mandate for wearing face masks in public buildings.

I am inclined to take advice of professionals in their areas of expertise. Some acceptance comes instinctively; the advice meets the test of logic. In this case I am not feeling the need for proof, but the ferocious controversary surrounding masks pushed me to make a life-and-death case for listening to the experts.

I collected and analyzed data my entire professional career. I knew enough to evaluate sources, knowing how easy it is to lie with statistics. So when I look at the international data coming out related to Covid-19, I do so critically, and with 45 years of professional experience. When I read that the United States has 25% of the world’s coronavirus cases but only 4% of the world’s population, I recognize that data collection and reporting is imperfect, and not all countries are equally aggressive in testing, but even with a large margin of error, the United States is unnecessarily suffering.

So I looked for counts of people dying from coronavirus. Yes, there are inconsistencies in assigning cause of death, but taking into account reporting error, death reporting is a more reliable comparison metric than reported cases.

Johns Hoskins University has established itself as the go-to resource for comprehensive, worldwide reporting on the coronavirus, incorporating data from CDC  and WHO. Looking at Johns Hopkins’ statistics on July 29, 2020, the average number of deaths worldwide is about 8.63 per 100,000 population. For the United States, the rate is 45.62 deaths per 100,000. That is a lower death rate than the United Kingdom (69.13), Spain (60.86), Italy (58.12), Peru (57.58), and Sweden (55.99), all countries that have had their problems combatting the coronavirus. France (45.12) and Brazil (42.27) are close behind the United States. These countries all have death rates well above that 8.63 world.

Death rates much lower than the United States in countries with 100,000 or more coronavirus cases include Iraq (11.8 per 100,000 people), Germany (11.01), Russia (9.33), Saudi Arabia (8.28), Turkey (6.86), Pakistan (2.76), India (2.47), Bangladesh (1.86), and Indonesia (1.83). China reported a rate of 0.33.

Discounting underreporting by developing countries, or by countries for political reasons, at face value the death rates tell us that you are about four times more likely to die of coronavirus in the United States than in Iraq or Germany, five times more likely than in Russia, over six times more likely than in Turkey, over 16 times more likely than in Pakistan, over 18 times more likely than in India, and about 25 times more likely than in Bangladesh and Indonesia. Compared to China, over 130 times more likely.

To bring the reality closer to home, compare international death rates to those of individual states. Someone in Texas or California is about twice as likely to die of coronavirus as someone in Germany. Someone in Florida is almost three times as likely to die than in Germany, Arizona four times as likely, and New York, fifteen times as likely.

New Hampshire adopted “Live Free or Die” as its state motto in 1945 toward the end of WWII. It has been co-opted by protestors choosing to defy healthcare professionals’ directives. Wearing a mask is not a relinquishment of freedom; it is an acceptance of established health care practice, based upon experience with this epidemic. If the motto is applied to coronavirus protestations, it should be modified to “Live Free and Die.”