Interesting perspective.
If we remove the big city statistics from each country, how do we compare?
Originally Posted by friendly fred
Fair point. When I read your post I thought you might have shot a huge hole in my analogy, but after a little research don't think you actually did. From Googling, about 82% of the Canadian population is urban and about 84% of the USA is.
I also ran across this, which confirms your belief that in general population density in cities has a big effect:
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/site...and-abroad.pdf
Look at the most densely populated cities in Europe and North America - many or most have been hit badly by Covid 19 - Paris, Barcelona, London, New York City, Naples (Italy), Turin. Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, which are around the middle of the list, will probably be hit harder than the rest of the USA. It's interesting that the Asian cities appear to be escaping without much damage, maybe except for Singapore which has seen Covid 19 spread through dormitories of migrant workers.
Also looking at the list, Texas cities have lower population densities than the major Canadian cities. And right now Texas on a per capita basis only has about 14% of the deaths that the USA has and less than half the deaths of Canada