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honu
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4 minutes ago, natway09 said:
It really does show what Americans think of their elderly population,,,,,,,, disposable ?
Horrible
It's not fair to put that on all Americans. If one fourth of all Americans really didn't care if there was a pandemic going on, and the real number may be one third, that would probably still be enough to cause continued exponential growth. Far too many people made an exception to observe Thanksgiving by gathering, for sure.
If you multiply out Germany's case and mortality rates to match the population difference (80 million versus 330, so times 4) the stats are about the same. Do Germans also not care about their elderly, or foolishly reject to take any precautions? A close friend is German but he doesn't tend to break down his description of practices there as I would in the US, openly addressing perspective problems. He was just in the process of booking a vacation trip when this spike occurred not so long ago, citing mental health as also of importance, needing to get out.
England isn't far off, or lots of other places, it's partly the population difference making the numbers stand out. Not that I'm rejecting that many Americans are idiots; that's also a main cause.
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conservative Americans' response: muh freedoms!
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As far as who would want to visit Thailand for two months or up to half a year, and do a quarantine, it's just whoever would happen to see that as reasonable and positive. People who only have 2 to 3 weeks of vacation time wouldn't, but plenty of people in the US retire in their 50s, or plenty of people over 65 have all the time in the world.
As far as Thailand being closed down, and not a good place to travel now, that hasn't matched my experience. In the last 3 to 4 months I've been to Pattaya twice, to Cha-am, Sriracha, Kanchanburi, Korat, and Chantaburi, and it's been a fantastic time to travel. There are specials on everything and lots of extra space due to tourism being slow. It's not even as if all those places have been ghostly quiet; Bangkok residents are taking advantage of government vouchers and subsidies, and business specials.
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They are saying the right things, but they will be saying a slightly different thing next week. People here recommending they open the country without quarantine restrictions make no sense; re-start the local experience of the pandemic for what? Thailand doesn't need 2-3 week vacationers, and can't afford the impact of welcoming them.
Really marketing these programs to draw people interested in longer stays will require saying the same things two weeks in a row.
It should have been a 60 day stay followed with the option to renew for two additional 60 day stays from the start. Financially secure retirees can afford to be in Thailand instead of their own country, where they stand a much higher chance of dying. By that I mean the middle class, not someone saving up for 11 months to visit one of the lowest cost of living destinations on the planet, to then live on the cheap there.
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I visited my brother living in Germany awhile back and he would drive 125 mph / 200 kph on the autobahn there. It was safe and practical, in a vehicle designed for it, but a bit faster than probably makes sense as a functional travel speed. If traffic is any heavier on those roads now, as I would expect it might be, it would be hard to replicate that.
It wouldn't be safe traveling that speed on any road in any vehicle in Thailand. Thais aren't expecting it; people could walk across the road without checking properly, or pull out from some turn-off.
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This herd-immunity strategy theme applied to Sweden never really matched what they were doing. Their shut-down wasn't as complete as in other places, while their case numbers and deaths were also higher than in others. As far as even potentially reaching 75-80% having had the disease that's just absurd. They've had 231,000 confirmed cases now, and the population is just over 10 million. That one guy's ideas (Tegnell) and acceptance of a seemingly flawed model of how many people had it there earlier on seem to have spread into inaccurate press, from May:
https://www.ft.com/content/a2b4c18c-a5e8-4edc-8047-ade4a82a548d
Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist who devised the no-lockdown approach, estimated that 40 per cent of people in the capital, Stockholm, would be immune to Covid-19 by the end of May, giving the country an advantage against a virus that “we’re going to have to live with for a very long time”...
...Primary and secondary schools, restaurants, cafés and shops are mostly open as normal in Sweden, with health authorities relying on voluntary social distancing and people opting to work from home. Schools for over-16s and universities are closed and gatherings of more than 50 people are banned, but it is still the most relaxed approach of any EU country...About a quarter of people in Stockholm had the virus at the start of May, according to a mathematical model by Sweden’s public health agency...
If their real mortality rate is 1% then 260,000 people in Stockholm, or about a fourth of the total population of Stockholm, have had it now, months later, most of the pandemic later, and 650,000 have had it country-wide. They really don't know the actual total infected number or mortality rate (every country would only be estimating that), but even if they were "going for" herd immunity they never got close.
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We just visited Pattaya this past weekend, for the second time in two months, and it is sad how that resort area is dying. I don't think embracing experience of the pandemic is a good solution.
It's sad but I also don't think the Thai government has it in them to put together any sort of a longer stay tourism plan, that stands any chance of working. What that would've involved seemed clear enough; keep it simple, make it easy, don't rush to add charges at every step, eliminate risk by adding a quarantine demand. Instead proposed plans changed every two weeks and no two government agencies were ever saying the same things.
The frustrating part is how marketable it would be to sell visiting a place where the cost of living is cheap, natural environment is beautiful, and there is a greatly reduced chance of dying. Two week vacationers wouldn't be a candidate, but every single at-high-risk person in a country like the US, or most of Europe, or South America who has the means to not work, or could work online for half a year, should want a break from isolation.
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It's interesting how according to the main theme here Thailand isn't being praised for stopping the pandemic because it's really raging on untracked and untested inside the country. No one knows anyone who has died of it, and the hospitals certainly aren't full, but many Thai Visa members never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
It would be a more natural criticism that TV members and people in other circumstances might be critical of the Thai government for not resolving the problems stemming from isolating the country (the key to stopping the pandemic exposure). Foreign tourism is shut down, a high price to pay. Resort areas are in economic free-fall. It probably was possible to put something like the long-stay visitation plans into effect, which Thailand hasn't been able to do, and at this rate never will. Vaccine development may offset this problem, maybe by the middle of 2021.
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This pretty much sums up the current status:
Trump and his Republican allies want to keep counting votes in 2 states where they're behind and stop counting votes in 3 states where they're ahead
To be fair people like McConnell aren't saying that, but I'm not sure that's really his "ally"
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An online friend just mentioned a new spike in Malaysia, and I think it helps place this to consider how it goes in other places. This article goes over that: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/malaysia-myanmar-emerge-as-new-coronavirus-hotspots/1996732
The numbers can be hard to place related to what real impact is. As others always comment here, road deaths are also a routine, daily tragedy, but people learn to live with that.
That spike in Malaysia relates to 500 cases per day over the last week and a half, and what looks like a handful of deaths, maybe 30 in that time. Of course the death spikes in trends tend to run a couple of weeks behind the case count spikes.
What expats saying "just open the country" in Thailand seem to miss is that people are going back into lockdown in Malaysia as a result. It might not be mandatory yet, but controlling the outbreak relates to that sort of control measure, so if people don't do that impact will keep increasing until they do. Or countries can let it run its course, and build up to a higher death count, as in Indonesia, with over 11,000 deaths, where people probably are self-isolating. It's kind of a no-win situation, with Thailand choosing one of several paths that are all not ideal.
I just talked to a contact in India about why they can have nearly 7 million cases and "only" 100,000 deaths. He said that the local strain must be less virulent. I looked up articles describing that background and it turns out that in about 21% of cases in India a cause of death is registered, for any death, and in the others it's just not documented. If someone gets ran over by a bus of course people know what happened but officially there are no stats tracking it. I mentioned that to him next and he agreed, causes of death aren't usually documented in India.
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About this question of Faucci getting the disease risk wrong, he really did. Here's a quote from that source that puts it in context:
On Jan. 26, Fauci gave an interview to John Catsimatidis, a syndicated radio host in New York. "What can you tell the American people about what’s been going on?" Catsimatidis asked. "Should they be scared?"
"I don’t think so," Fauci said. "The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It’s a very, very low risk to the United States, but it’s something we, as public health officials, need to take very seriously."
Bear in mind the first two people died on January 9th and January 15th, and this quote is from 11 days after that second death. It didn't take long into February that the writing was on the wall, and Fauci admitted that he had been mistaken. Trump kept rejecting that the pandemic was serious through March, until the death toll made that impossible to ignore. He didn't publicly wear a mask or admit people should be wearing masks until much later, July 12th. Let that sink in, July 12th: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53378439
Trump still hasn't played any significant role in resolving this pandemic now, seven months into it, and he never will.
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In retrospect things should have been handled much differently, but it only works to hold China accountable for what they did when they knew what they knew.
Probably a faster and different response back in December was in order. It helps to keep in mind that no one died from this disease in that month, until January 9th, with a second dying on January 15th. That changes perspective, related to the disease actually being that dangerous. 41 cases were confirmed as of January 2nd, but it wasn't clear what that meant then, since they were still figuring out what the disease was. China was already reporting ongoing status to the WHO beginning on January 4th, and had already made the illness event public on December 31st.
They completely shut down all travel in China on January 24th, a step that would be completely impossible in any other country, regardless of circumstances. Looking back there is lots they should've did differently, in particular completely isolating Wuhan earlier.
People involved, medical professionals, would've had differing opinions, and some of them "knew," so the government should have responded differently. But that's equally true in the US and elsewhere, that delays resulted from waiting for more consensus. It doesn't really work to go back and look at the most serious warnings in retrospect, and treat those as confirmed public knowledge.
The CDC timeline of events: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6905e1.htm
The Wikipedia version (a little patchy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_January_2020
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I didn't read every comment, so this may have already come up, but part of the problem is the wife in that couple pointing the gun at people with her finger on the trigger. That's not a safe practice.
Of course more conservative Americans would support what they were doing, in general, but people familiar with gun safety and use of guns don't do that. And if they do it's likely to violate a local law, because you risk someone else's life by not knowing how to handle your own weapon. She's lucky that she didn't shoot her husband. If she had taken firearm training courses and just forgot that part in the heat of the moment that's not really ok. For everyone here not familiar with basics, I was taught these things as a child, so that by the age of 7 or 8 I could handle a handgun more responsibly than her:
1. treat every gun as if it's loaded, even when you know it's not
2. don't point a gun at anyone or anything you don't intend to shoot (which does not include acting threatening; mimicking Hollywood movies isn't ok, I guess up until you are actually in a Mexican standoff, then what can you do)
3. don't put your finger on the trigger until you are going to fire the weapon
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Trump's own family saying that he's a complete scumbag who shouldn't be trusted means nothing, because 50% of the country already knows that, and 40% don't care, and 10% are probably off in space. That second set probably believes it on one level too, but is somehow deluded into thinking something like "a dirty job requires an unscrupulous person," or some such BS.
Trump never should have been elected. America more or less deserves him as a president if 40% of the country firmly backs him, even if 50% hate him. That many people with that bad judgment and reasoning tells me that the whole country is all but not worth saving.
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It's a little known fact that tea in China was originally prepared in a ground form, before it ever even went to Japan. It was compressed earlier in it's history too, not stored as loose leaves, and treated more as a medicine than a drink as we experience it now.
The health claim in this that matcha has 10 times the nutrients of green tea sounds way off. Shading during growth does increase the amounts of some compounds, and extraction rates are high for brewing tea but not as high as just eating the leaves (how matcha works out). But I've seen research on tea compounds present tied to health claims and that's the wrong order of magnitude. Matcha is also harder on your stomach than most other kinds of teas, as conventional green tea also is, just probably slightly more so.
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The latest thing I'm into, beyond trying lots of teas, which I'm passing on mentioning here, is tea tastings. I held a free, open tea tasting at the Benjasiri Park about three weeks ago, which went well.
Tomorrow (as of time of posting this) I'll hold a second at the Dusit Zoo, on Saturday the 18th, from 10 to 12 AM at the food court there, beside the elephant pen and acrobatics show. The idea is to share tea experience, since writing blog posts and mentioning tea in forums only goes so far.
https://www.facebook.com/events/245314849431085/
We'll probably try a compressed white tea (Gong Mei), a fresh Nepalese white tea, some version of oolong that's not standard, a black tea (maybe an aged Shai Hong, a Yunnan black), and most likely some sheng and shou pu'er, compressed Yunnan tea, with the second type pre-fermented. Few enough tea enthusiasts would have ever tried all that, and for people not really into tea hardly any of it would ring a bell. There's no need to bring anything if you do want to join, just try not to run too late, since that place will get really crowded at noon, and setting aside seating after 11 won't work. I don't plan to accept any donations; the theme is just sharing some tea. That zoo closes the end of this month so it's a good time to check it out too.
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The perspective was more about why Asian women would feel an attraction, not why using an older white guy as a steady stream of income without actually maintaining much of a romantic relationship works out much better.
That was the first part though, that it really could just be a financial move. Just minus the idea that it wouldn't have to get in the way of dating or maintaining a second long-term relationship.
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There's the one obvious answer that's going to occur to people here, for financial gain, and that's part of it. So is a potential status-level boost, or problems with dating local Asians, seeing foreigners as a viable alternative.
I answered a Quora question about all that, and listed what I thought the full set of reasons might be:
The last part isn't so simple. People aren't as into cultural stereotypes or gender stereotypes as they had been these days but there's still something to all of that.
Women can keep getting more assertive and independent and Eastern and Western cultures can mix and shift but the old standard forms don't completely vanish. They never were principles that held in all cases, type-stereotypes, but the funny thing about stereotypes is that there's usually an underlying truth to them, mixed with them not being true in a lot of ways and cases.
It occurs to me that to the extent those stereotypes still do apply (that Asians are more group oriented, or men more assertive / aggressive, and so on) that the stereotype set for Asians matches up with women better, and men's type better with Western culture.
Maybe all this is just common sense, or maybe I'm way off on some parts. It's written more for a Western-based audience, for the typical Quora reader, (like Yahoo answers, but a dedicated social media site), where it's not such familiar ground.
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On 1/30/2018 at 10:10 PM, mommysboy said:
A normal drinker is one who can drink a glass of wine/beer and be satisfied at that. The problem is I've never met him yet!
I guess it's unlikely we'll ever meet but I do typically drink one or two beers a week, and that seems fine to me. I put in my time with drinking lots more when I was younger and somehow just moved away from it.
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This thread isn't really working to promote discussion here but I'll mention a few more recent themes anyway. I just wrote about tea devices, an overview of types used to brew tea, and about ideal brewing temperature for oolong, and the best storage conditions for pu'er (compressed tea that improves with age). In case any of those are of interest I'll add links to make clicking there easier. The last also covers what relative humidity is in detail, a bit of a chemistry basics tangent.
http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/11/tea-gear-on-brewing-devices.html
http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/11/is-there-one-best-oolong-brewing.html
http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/11/puer-storage-optimums-and-relative.html
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Related to the subject of getting started on tea coming up in Facebook groups and Reddit threads I wrote a post about that:
http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/09/advice-to-beginners-about-tea.html
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I just wrote a review of three different water parks in that area (including a local alternative in the Rayong Adventure Park, not the same thing since it's based on those bouncy-castle type slides). It's all pretty much the same as covered here though.
Both parks are running about 1200 per person for admission now, close to the same as each other, with an occasional special dropping that for either. They're relatively equivalent. The main difference might be that the Ramayana park had a much better slide selection for younger kids, for those 5 or under. For kids 7 to 8 or up the range would probably be more similar, since they could do the medium sized versions at Cartoon Network. Ramayana is a lot bigger in terms of space, and food options were broader, and slightly lower in cost, but Cartoon Network is selling local foods for the typical 60 to 70 baht per dish range if that's a concern. Both places do search you to make sure you don't bring food in.
They closed the Ramayana park down at 5:30, an hour before CN shut down, a half hour before the listed closure time, so if you ran late you might need to rush to get enough play in. From there lots of little details varied. CN had a better wave pool, and a free simulated wave riding area, and water volleyball, and those characters dancing around every hour. Ramayana had more recliners under umbrellas, more space to hang out, and a sand play area.
That local area, Rayong Adventure Park, is worth a visit but sort of a different kind of thing, with admission there a bit over 200 baht, as I recall. For people in Bangkok the Pororo water park is a nice option, located on the top of the Central Bangna mall in Bangna-Trad road down at Bangkok. Their pricing seems to vary a lot with specials but it's well below 1000 baht, more on the order of 600, I think, with a lot less slides (four larger ones), but enough that it strikes a good balance. There aren't lots more details in this post but more about my own experience and a few pictures (in a blog that's really usually about tea):
http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/08/three-water-parks-in-rayong-thailand.html
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I don't live in Chiang Mai so I wouldn't be a good reference for what is available there. Other than Monsoon one of the plantations uses a shop in the airport as a sales outlet, and besides that I don't know of other vendors. Online sourcing expands range to absolutely everywhere but I still don't have much for Thai white tea sources to pass on.
I don't tend to love silver needle teas, preferring the complexity that comes with using some leaf material as well (so Bai Mu Dan style teas, or Moonlight whites, which seems to also be a reference to sourcing from Fuding area teas versus Yunnan teas). I reviewed that one "wild" Monsoon vendor version that was nice but a bit unusual, but I've never tried another version of Thai white tea that fits that description at all.
I'll mention sources from a number of other local countries at the end and you can look through them and see what you think, one from Laos, Indonesia, Vietnam, and both Yunnan and Wuyishan (Fujian) in China. Really there would be good options for Fuding teas too (a main Chinese area for white teas), I've just not ran across a great source to pass on. The one seller is a vendor that makes and sells teas in Wuyishan (Fujian, China), Wuyi Origin, someone I'm more familiar with. I've never tried their white teas, to be honest, only their oolongs and black teas, which they are famous for, and also oolongs made in Chaozhou (Dan Cong, versus Wuyi Yancha). I would expect their claims related to teas being grown without use of chemicals is accurate, but you would do well to take other people's opinions for what they are worth, including my own.
Green tea is my least favorite type of tea. That makes it hard to recommend those or keep track of what seems best, being outside my typical range of preference. I do drink Longjing, one exception, probably the main Chinese green tea type, which tends to be less grassy and vegetal due to how it is processed, tasting more nutty or like toasted rice. The Thailand vendor Tea Village sells a decent version but it really is mid-range; for people really into that tea type it might not be the quality level they are looking for. Again I don't have a suggestion for a better online source. I've bought good Longjing versions in shops in the Bangkok Chinatown, and a US vendor friend passed on a competition grade version once that was better than those.
It's a tough question related to the amount of chemicals in Royal Project tea. I'd only be passing on hearsay, little better than a guess. From what I've heard Thai teas in general are grown using more chemicals than is typical for other types, and that may or may not be true of those sold through Royal Project outlets. It's hard to know who to trust related to claims about that. Organic certifications mean something, they do testing related to that, but from what I've heard "local" certifications and testing processes outside those defined and enforced by European and US agencies may not mean as much.
Just because there isn't a claim based around a certification there may not necessarily be chemicals used. At a guess in all these sources mentioned at the end far less chemicals would be used than for most Thai tea sources, but the claims that each is completely organic I'm not so sure about. Toba Wangi grows teas in a conventional farm set-up, giving them good control over the inputs, and they sell directly, but others growing in more "natural" environments may be better set up to grow tea effectively without using chemicals. Only Wuyi Origin of the others is the actual farmer, the one growing and picking tea, and a lot of that within the natural park area in Wuyishan, where chemicals cannot be brought in (to some extent they monitor that). The others may understand that their teas are grown without use of any chemical pesticides but they may or may not know. It's really hard to place what "organic" even means since a naturally derived chemical can also be unhealthy, and the "organic" restriction would still allow that use. I research random topics related to tea but haven't went far with reviewing organic farming or contaminant issues yet.
Those other vendors (I can talk more about these, if you have questions, and I've reviewed white teas by all of them, except from Wuyi Origin):
https://www.facebook.com/kinnaritea/ (Laos tea, reseller and processing consultant)
http://www.tobawangi.com/products/speciality-tea/ (Indonesian tea, plantation owner and processor)
https://www.farmer-leaf.com/ (Yunnan tea producer and reseller; their involvement depends on product type)
http://drinksbeansandleaves.com/ (Indonesia vendor background page: http://hatvala.com/hatvalacoffe/teas-vietnam)
http://www.wuyiorigin.com/ (Wuyishan, Fujian tea grower and producer)
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I wrote a guide on tea options in Bangkok (to a lesser extent throughout Thailand), covering types made and cafe and shop options. The post mentions a couple of online sources but mostly skips that part, sticking to physical shop outlets.
http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/07/tea-in-thailand-thai-tea-types-and.html
I reviewed a Royal Project Jin Xuan (#12) not long ago, a good example of a basic, reasonable quality, inexpensive Thai tea. I bought 100 grams of that version for 100 baht, enough dry loose tea to make dozens of cups nice light oolong tea for roughly the cost of a cup of coffee (or maybe three bubble tea drinks). I usually drink higher end teas, rarer, more costly and more unusual versions but as far as buying good tea for good value goes this type can't be beat:
http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/07/thai-royal-project-jin-xuan-oolong-12.html
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Americans get stern holiday warning: 'No Christmas parties' due to COVID
in World News
Posted
Maybe what I meant wasn't clear. The US has a population of 330 million, Germany 83, so 4:1. Current US daily deaths are at 2500, Germany at 600, so essentially 4:1. Given that both are currently increasing, related to the general point, it doesn't make sense to compare a monthly or per-nine-months average, to instead consider a weekly average as the current rate.
Germany is holding steady at 25,000 new cases per day for the last 6 weeks. The US has transitioned from a level of 100,000 (back at that same time-frame, beginning of November) to a recent daily maximum of 280,000, with a two-week average a bit over 200,000. Over two weeks prior to that the average was just over 150,000, but the post-Thanksgiving increase has been significant. Daily case stats are still higher, double the per-population rate of Germany at this point, with a clear indication that will increase in the US, instead of leveling off.
Part of the point is that although US pandemic case and death stats are absurd one part of that apparent absurdity is from having four times the population of most other Western nations, or more. What comes next in the US will be different than in Europe, for sure; the spike due to the Thanksgiving will happen again, related to Christmas.
That wasn't about singling out Germany. The UK has a current case average of 20,000 per day, and average daily deaths close to 500. It sounds much lower than in the US, but the population is 66 million, one fifth that of the US. Rate of deaths per population is roughly identical to the US, case rates only half.
I have no idea why the current deaths per population rates are nearly identical in all three countries but the US new case rate is double that of the other two. It seems likely that error in keeping accurate stats might be more responsible than a factor of two difference in mortality rate. US isn't testing broadly enough to show true case counts, but that should cause the known mortality rate to look too high, not lower.