You certainly do ned to scale for population and it amazes me that people seem to miss that (I suspect it's often wilfully missed). Though I will say that only scaling for population is also woefully inadequate if you're trying to judge the effectiveness of a nations response. There are too many other factors at play. Not just size population but density of population, age of population, wealth of population, even gender and ethnicity of population. Then you've got to consider when the virus arrived in the country, ease of travel in the country pre-virus, a bunch of cultural factors... the list of things that can come into play is endless and I'm honestly left thinking that national comparisons of statistics are largely just a stick to beat each other with. That said we're currently running worst in Europe so yay for us.

I think you can see whether a nation's failing without needing to look at the stats. The US is failing. Sorry, it just is. And I find Trump's continuing politicisation of this disgusting. The UK's failing too. We still haven't got the PPE we need, the Turkish shipment turned up late and, when it did, it turns out half the contents didn't meet standards so can't be used. We almost met our testing target... for one day. And now we're saying that the problem is that we have the supply but there's not enough demand. Really? Because I don't know a single person in this country who wouldn't have a test tomorrow if they could. The problem is not the demand, it's the logistics of allocating the supply we have.