[russellw]

I forgot to mention it but Belgium has become the first (and probably only) country to surpass the 100 mortalities per 100k of population mark. The next closest is Italy (88) and Spain (74).

Oddly enough, they don't (thankfully) have the highest infection rate per 100k with 616 - behind the USA (806), Spain (732) and Italy (622).

Italy and Spain (it should be noted) are both approaching 10,000 tests per 100,000 adult population which is well ahead of some other countries in Europe - notably France (2,685), the Netherlands (2,326) and Brazil (443). Australia and NZ are both around the 7,000 mark.

I'm sure there is something to be learnt from the data for tests per confirmed case. Australia and NZ are miles in front of any other country at ~170 tests per confirmed case while Ecuador, Brazil and Mexico are at the other end of the scale with <5.

As each of those three countries is also well behind in the tests per 100k, there are really only two possible conclusions: (1) they are really good at picking which cases to test and thus the success rate is high and therefore they don't need to test a greater percentage of the population; or (2) if their case identification rate was similar to the global average of 11.88 tests per confirmed case and they tested similar numbers of people then their case numbers would be much higher than they currently are. For example, Brazil has only tested 0.44% of the adult population so to get to even the 2.5% mark would require a bit over 4M extra tests and at 12 tests per case that's still an extra 360k cases or more than double the current number.

The plus side of that increase (of course) is the CMR would halve although the case numbers per 100k would also double.