[russellw]

I was looking through the countries with zero deaths to see if anything could be gleaned but they are mostly tiny places like Anguila (3 cases, population 15K) but there are a couple worth noting:

Bhutan (103 / 177K);
Cambodia (240 / 16M)
Mongolia (293 / 3.2M)

If the figures reported are accurate then there has to be a reason why there isn't a single fatality amongst those 636 cases given that even in Australia that would be ~6 deaths and based on the global average it would be more like 24.

Someone mentioned South Korea as being worth a look and yes, they had a very early onset with high case numbers peaking at 851 on March 3rd but that was reduced to the 70-100 level by mid-March and got down to single digits by mid-April although it gradually increased to the 50-60 cases per day level where it has remained pretty much ever since. This would suggest that their early strategy was very effective but that they have either eased those restriction or people stopped complying at the same level.

It's a country with about twice our population (51M) but they have had less total cases (14,389 compared to 18,318) but also about 50% more deaths. On a population basis they have had 28 cases / 100k (71) and 0.587 (0.867) deaths per 100k. Only their CMR of 2.092% is worse compared to ours at 1.2%. The only question mark as far as case numbers is that they have tested a lot less of their population than we have - 3% compared to 10%.