One of the truisms in life is that you can't compare apples to oranges.  The same is true for comparing certain types of data across different countries.  That's why it's important, when debating America's response to the Wuhan virus, to know that another piece of evidence has emerged indicating that the U.S. is grossly overcounting the number of people who died from the Wuhan virus.  It turns out that, while the U.S. attributed all pneumonia fatalities to the virus, Singapore, which had the lowest fatality count in the world, did not.

The Deccan Herald explains at some length why Singapore performed so wonderfully when it came to its response to the Wuhan virus.  Part of Singapore's success was undoubtedly due to its being a small, tightly controlled country that could immediately do mass testing and contact tracing.  Singapore also instantly hospitalized people, treating them before they had severe symptoms.

The most significant way, though, that Singapore parted ways from other countries — including America — is that it counted deaths according to a narrow, WHO-approved formula:

Singapore sticks rigidly to the WHO's case definitions for classifying Covid-19 deaths. It does not include non-pneumonia fatalities like those caused by blood or heart issues among Covid-19 patients in its official tally.

"I have no doubt that if the WHO revises its case definitions, some of the non-pneumonia deaths will be reclassified and the mortality rate will change," said Paul Tambyah, president of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, without specifying how much it would likely shift.

Todd Lowdon decided to calculate America's Wuhan virus death count using the standard that the WHO set and Singapore followed.  The results were stunning:

The ratio of COVID-19 deaths in the US "with" and "without" pneumonia has been fairly consistent at about 45:55. In addition to testing more per capita than any other large country, the US also adopts a very expansive definition of C19 deaths. https://t.co/hkF33vTQXo pic.twitter.com/mkQqSnYqBI

— Todd Lowdon (@tlowdon) September 26, 2020

What’s ironic is that, when it comes to any discussions about treatments for the Wuhan virus or the virus’s infectiousness, the tech giants have been shutting down information that doesn’t come from WHO. For them, WHO is the gold standard.

It’s entirely likely, though, that if the CDC were suddenly to start counting virus deaths in America according to the WHO standard, which would drop the death count from 200,000 (“Trump is going to kill you”) to 86,000 (“it’s just a bad flu season”), the tech giants would scream more loudly than anyone else.

And of course, the number of deaths from the virus would drop even more if we were able to subtract all the other deaths that found their way into the statistics because someone died from another cause entirely, but tested positive for the virus:

For months doctors and investigative journalists have wondered why state coronavirus death counts include motorcycle accidents, homicides, birth defects, gunshot wounds and thousands of intentional injuries and poisonings to the US Coronavirus death totals.

It’s almost as if the medical elites are doing all they can to pad the coronavirus death counts?

What's ironic is that, when it comes to any discussions about treatments for the Wuhan virus or the virus's infectiousness, the tech giants have been shutting down information that doesn't come from WHO.  For them, the WHO is the gold standard.

It's entirely likely, though, that if the CDC were suddenly to start counting virus deaths in America according to the WHO standard, which would drop the death count from 200,000 ("Trump is going to kill you") to 86,000 ("it's just a bad flu season"), the tech giants would scream more loudly than anyone else.

And the number of deaths from the virus would drop even more if we were able to subtract all the other deaths that found their way into the statistics because someone died from another cause entirely, but tested positive for the virus:

For months doctors and investigative journalists have wondered why state coronavirus death counts include motorcycle accidents, homicides, birth defects, gunshot wounds and thousands of intentional injuries and poisonings to the US Coronavirus death totals.

It's almost as if the medical elites are doing all they can to pad the coronavirus death counts?

This is not the first time that the left has used America's generous statistical counts against it.  One of the things leftists have told Americans is that we have a high infant mortality rate compared to other first-world countries because we lack socialized medicine.  The real issue, though, is again one of apples and oranges.

Different countries have different ways of determining what's a "live birth."  America is one of the few countries in the world that counts any baby born alive, no matter how fragile, as a living baby for infant mortality purposes.

In other countries, including Europe and Asia, the public records count as a "live birth" only babies who are a specific minimum size or weight, or who have already survived a certain amount of time outside of the mother.  This means that comparing U.S. numbers with other countries' numbers is an apples-and-oranges comparison unless you adjust for the differing baseline of what constitutes a live birth.  Any study that holds that America has an unreasonably high infant mortality rate is based upon a flawed comparison of unequal data.

There are two adages to remember here: "Lies, damn lies, and statistics."  "GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out."  Either way, America is not disgracefully failing its citizens, no matter what the left likes to say.

Image: Created by A. Widburg on Pixlr using public domain image.