Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images )

A grim series of articles published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association makes clear just how hard the United States has failed at controlling the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic—from the country’s horrifying death toll to its inability to drag down its shamefully high death rates.

It was already clear that the US has tallied more deaths from the coronavirus than any other country and has one of the highest death rates per capita in the world. But, according to one article in the series, the US is also failing to lower COVID-19 death rates—even as harder-hit countries have managed to learn from early disease peaks and bring their rates down substantially.

For the analysis , researchers Alyssa Bilinski of Harvard and Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania compared the shifting COVID-19 death rates of 18 high-income countries during three time windows. The idea was to see how death rates changed as countries adopted different public health interventions, especially if they had seen surges in cases early on that boosted their overall death rate during the pandemic. Specifically, Bilinski and Emanuel looked at COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people starting from February 13, May 10, and June 7, with all three windows ending on September 19.

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump arrives for a "Keep America Great" campaign rally at Huntington Center in Toledo, Ohio, on January 9, 2020. (credit: Getty | Saul Loeb )

The CEO of the American Cancer Society has refuted President Trump’s claim that his administration had a hand in lowering the country’s cancer mortality rate, which has been steadily declining since 1991—26 years prior to Trump taking office.

Trump’s bold claim came after the American Cancer Society published its latest data on US cancer mortality rates in an annual report. The data, published Wednesday, January 8, indicated that the overall cancer mortality rate continued its downward slide through 2017, with a 2.2 percent drop between 2016 and 2017. That’s the largest single-year drop in cancer mortality rate ever recorded. And, overall, mortality rates between 1991 and 2017 have declined by 29 percent, sparing an estimated 2.9 million deaths from cancer in that time frame.

The next day, January 9, Trump posted a tweet appearing to take credit for the decline, writing: “U.S. Cancer Death Rate Lowest In Recorded History! A lot of good news coming out of this Administration.”