Luxembourg

Luxembourg is a small country in western Europe with 613,000 people population (comparable to that of US states Vermont and Wyoming) and size smaller than Rhode Island. Following numerous requests, I collected some facts (as of 10 April 2020) and for ease of reference, will compare Luxembourgish data against the United States of America.

Testing

5 percent of Luxembourg’s population have been tested so far, or more than 46,000 tested per million people, one of the highest ratios worldwide. USA presently has slightly over 7,100 tested per million.
0.5 percent of Luxembourgish population have been tested positive, one of the highest in the world too. For comparison, 0.5% of US population is over 1.6 million; presently there are 0.5 million cases.

Health system

Luxembourg’s health system is so well organised that many beds in the intensive care units are empty and the country gallantly treats patients from neighbouring countries, such as France. On the contrary, in the USA (data as of 2018), 8.5 percent of people, or 27.5 million, did not have health insurance.

Deaths

Number of deaths, infected with COVID-19: 54 or about 1.5 percent of those tested positive in Luxembourg. In the USA there are 18,637 deaths, or about 3.6 percent of those tested positive. The higher mortality in the USA might be simply attributed to the lower intensity of testing.
Median age of the deceased in Luxembourg (infected with COVID-19) is 87 years. It has to be read in the context that life expectancy in Luxembourg is 82 years (vs. 78 years for the USA).

Should I freak out?

According to the World Health Organisation “influenza is a serious global health threat that impacts all countries: every year, there are an estimated 1 billion cases, 3-5 million severe cases, and 290,000-650,000 influenza-related respiratory deaths worldwide”. Yet, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the vast majority of us were not scared of influenza. Why freak out now? Maybe it is not the COVID-19 we have to be afraid of, but rather the ineffective healthcare system in some countries worldwide.