This sounds like a pretty lame excuse: I don't want to be compared to asian countries because they do too well. Also germany also isn't looking good anymore if compared to the asian countries, germany has over 100 deaths per million people. Yes, the US has three times that number, but it is still 20 times higher than South Korea.

All cultural things you said about asian countries could have been easily adopted in the west too: masks, not so much kissing and hugging, better preparation after previous diseases.

This is going a bit off topic, but I've always felt like this argument didn't make much sense. When you look at all of the things which contribute to the cost of an item, labor costs make up a small portion of it. There is also ingredient/goods costs and overheads to consider. There is also the consideration that minimum wage increases do not apply to every worker, so you are not seeing a 10% increase in overall wage costs when you increase the minimum wage 10%.

As such, the data that I've found indicated that a 10% increase of minimum wage tends to increase cost of goods by about 0.4% (some studies find it to be higher for food service/fast food, but still not anywhere close to 10%). That means the people who see their wages increased 10% get a significant increase in buying power while everyone else gets a very minor decrease in buying power.

https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/does-increasing-minimum-wage-lead-higher-prices

"By looking at changes in restaurant food pricing during the period of 1978–2015, MacDonald and Nilsson find that prices rose by just 0.36 percent for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, which is only about half the size reported in previous studies. They also observe that small minimum wage increases do not lead to higher prices and may actually reduce prices. Furthermore, it is also possible that small minimum wage increases could lead to increased employment in low-wage labor markets."

US is at 333 pr million atm.
Only countries over 600 atm in europe is basically Belgium.

UK, Sweden, Spain, Italy  are all in the 450-590 ish range though.
However apart from Sweden + UK, most other places in "europe" have beat down the coronavirus to very small numbers.
(ei. not so many new cases or deaths, pr capital)

Meanwhile the US never managed to get the virus down to these levels.
Also europe was hit like a month before the US with the virus outbreak.

So basically a month or two from now, things will look much worse in the US than basically most places in europe.
(in terms of cases pr million, and deaths pr million)

Yep, what he meant was my display of the Y-scale was wrong. I used standard evenly spaced lines and plotted log ( 3-day avg reported cases ) on the Y-axis to easily judge delta log ( new cases )

Displaying the scale the correct way

It doesn't matter, the slope of the lines is what I'm looking for which is the growth rate when displaying new cases at a logarithmic scale.

Iran is accelerating and reached 154% week over week growth, 11.3 days to double.
Brazil and India are currently growing at the same pace, 3-day avg of 134.7% week over week, 16.3 days to double.
The USA is at 108% week over week, slightly trending back towards decline.
Japan and South Korea had a slight uptick, holding at just over 40 new cases per day.
Australia is holding at 12 cases per day

Canada is declining at 74% week over week, 16 days to half the numbers. (All thanks to Quebec's rapid decline, Ontario is growing again atm)

US is already back to slight growth week over week, the gap with Europe is getting bigger in reported cases and deaths.

Europe 16.3K cases per day, 812 reported deaths per day, 96.3% week over week decline. (Russia, UK and Sweden keeping the decline at bay)
USA 21.6K cases per day, 1083 reported deaths per day, 107.7% week over week growth.

The gap in cases between Europe and USA is currently 121K, down from 202K 7 days earlier.
The gap in reported deaths is still much bigger percentage wise, 66.9K , down from 68.3K 7 days earlier.

At the current rate it's still over 3 weeks before the USA has more total cases than Europe. However the difference per day is slowly growing, USA is catching up a bit faster each day.

The data I access has US at 333, UK at 606, Spain at 610, Italy 560, France 433, Belgium 830, Sweden 445, etc. At least based on the numbers sent by the countries which can be misleading according to the country (some people even believe china's numbers).

In the end US will probably be in the ballpark of 450-600 just as the other European countries.

Yes it could be much much better as I said previously, but for several reasons it is a very difficult thing to do. People and media just dont accept it until they see the numbers rising and people close to them getting infected or dying.

Imagine US government trying to implement the same thing 4 weeks before, when the numbers of cases was very very low in US. Trump closing the borders 4 weeks before. It just wouldn't happen. You just have political support to do it once things get serious. 

It's something really difficult to do and I really don't judge the politicians this time as this is a catch 22. Again, I expect the western world can learn a lesson or two from it.

In my company the worst paid jobs (order pickers) get around 2,5k a month. 

What do they have to do as minimum per month? 

Pick minimum 30k packages with around 15 sales units per package. Average sales price of one unit is like 5€

So, they pick goods worth over 2 million each. 

I'm sure a little pay raise for these guys wouldn't be the reason to go broke. But they already earn more than in many other companies which should definitely pay more.

The way to a cashless society has accelerated greatly thanks to the crisis

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/are-canadians-ready-to-go-cashless-after-coronavirus-1.4970838

“We project the pandemic will accelerate several years’ worth of digital transformation,” says Stacey Madge, country manager and president of Visa Canada.

According to Payments Canada data released in mid-May, 62 per cent of Canadians reported using less cash and 42 per cent had avoided shopping at places that don’t accept contactless payments. Many users of e-transfers, PayPal and credit cards said they were using them more.

“While we have seen a continued shift towards digital payments over a number of years in Canada, there’s no doubt that the prevailing pandemic has accelerated this shift – and will likely act as a catalyst in transforming the Canadian payment landscape forever,” said Tracey Black, CEO of Payments Canada in a press release.

According to Interac, a record 61.3 million e-transfers took place in April, up 62 per cent year over year, and first-time users increased by 43 per cent since mid-March. About half of consumer spending on Visa cards in January was face to face. In just weeks, 60 per cent of spending was what is called “card not present” in the business. That was mostly driven by grocery delivery or pickup and restaurant delivery, says Madge. To minimize the touching of PIN pads in stores, banks and credit card companies raised the limit on tap transactions from $100 to $250.

“Canada overall, is a very low cash-usage country. Of about a trillion dollars in personal consumer expenditures, less than five per cent of that is cash,” says Madge. One study in 2017 concluded Canada was the No. 1 most cashless country in the world, topping the list because the country had more than two credit cards per person and because 57 per cent of payments were cashless. A Bank of Canada survey the same year found that about one in 10 respondents said they were entirely cashless. At the end of 2019, about 73 per cent of total transaction volume in Canada was electronic, says Ramesh Siromani, senior vice-president of enterprise payments at RBC, and cash use has declined about 40 per cent in the last five years.


Another way we are following Sweden

Sweden has long been the poster-nation for a cashless society, by some estimates as soon as 2023. It’s so far down that road that many bank branches are cashless and thousands of Swedes even went into the sci-fi realm by getting microchips implanted in their hands that allow payments with a swipe of the hand.

My wife still uses cash since she buys and sells online with pickup, however that has stagnated since the crisis and changed to e-transfers for some transactions. She also uses it for plant sales. I use(d) cash for coffee and other small purchases and to pay for pool opening/closing help. (They like to keep it off the record) Other than that, it's mostly credit card and some e-transfers. All the regular stuff has been online payments for well over a decade. Kinda funny, my smallest is just having to learn all about cash (for counting). So the most use of cash atm is to learn math haha.

Its crazy how many people I still see believing COVID is a hoax.

Give it another 2-4 days, and watch as the infection numbers climb in the US.
The virus doesnt care if your ignorant of it, or dont belive in it. Just makes it easier for it to spread.

Millions of people out protesting in 100's of cities in the US, is bound to have a impact.
it just takes a week or so for symptoms to show, and a few days more for some of those with symptoms to get so sick they go to the hospitals and then get tested for it there.

Its been like ~4 days of protesting now, so some are probably starting to show symptoms, but not really be feeling too sick yet.
Another 2-4 days, and you'll see numbers climb (imo).

Virus doesnt stop being infectious because your out protesting.

*edit:
Its too soon, rethinking it.
A super spreader is amoung the crowd, and he infects like 50 people.... which "could" show up as daily new cases a week after.
However thats not when you really notice the numbers climb.

Its when those 50 pass it on to another 50-100 people, which in turn pass it onto another 100-200 ect.

So the effects of the protest, in terms of rappid spread, might not be super noticeable until like a month down the line.