system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Very very very very basic question.

Considering the covid-19 pandemic, why is "Total number of cases in a country (ranked)" a more quoted statistic than "unit number of cases in a country (ranked)"? Is the latter tougher to interpret for the common man or is it more difficult to compute? Or is there some other reason?
gpt
Three issues here: one political, one educational, and one is somewhat of a statistical problem. 

1) especially in US media, they want sensationalized stories and titles. "Most cases in the world" is a powerful and simple statement.

2) education: the per capita case count is slightly trickier to understand, and doesn't fit neatly into a headline 

3) The more interesting statistical issue is around small sample sizes and confounding variables. The highest number of covid deaths per capita so far have been: Czechia, San Marino, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montengro, North Macedonia, Moldova, and Belgium. Many of these countries are small (small sample size) or remarkably different from the US in composition (i.e primarily urban). They are also less well known countries that have less influence over pop culture. Due to their small size, a high death rate doesn't necessarily lead to many deaths. San Marino for example has the 1st or 2nd highest covid death rate in the world (depending on source) with about 80 covid deaths. It's not sufficient to be an interesting study around the spread and missed prevention opportunities.

Some argue the ideal metric would be death rate among G20 (highly developed) countries. In that case, it's Belgium. They got hit very hard by covid, and it's because Belgium is particularly urban and an international center of politics, trade, and culture. And that's true, Belgium is not rural like the center of the US, it's more comparable to New York, New Jersey, or Massachusetts, all of which have had a **higher** death rate than Belgium (despite the US as a whole have a lower death rate). Unfortunately, these metrics around how to normalize and how to subdivide areas end up in almost circular arguments, primarily driven by people looking to point fingers at which government did the worst job protecting their people. If the media gets to pick the metric, they just keep the metric simple and use it to point at the US Federal Govt, and that's not unreasonable.

Edit: also let's not forget when Trump tried arguing on 60 minutes about normalized metrics that has now turned into a popular meme, but he argued for deaths / cases, and not deaths / population. The first one is a measure of healthcare quality and availability of testing, while the 2nd is a measure of how much a country was impacted by covid. Either way, Trump chose the metric simply because it made the US look better.