From  Worldometer , COVID-19 cases this past week (in parentheses, cases in the last 7 days/million population): World  3,626,189 (453) #1  Japan  1,029,587 (8198) #2  S. Korea  455,268 (8869) #3  France  396,007 (6038) #4  Brazil  299,204 (1389) #5  USA  294,280 (879) #6  Germany  221,956 (2646) #7  Italy  130,145 2160) #8  Taiwan  106,827 (4472) #9  Hong Kong  206,806 (14,045) #10  Australia  103,147 (3957) I can generalize in various ways.   Sure, China did start the pandemic, but the two epicenters quickly became Europe and USA.   Countries of the Orient and Oceania fared well for the first two years. Today, the leading COVID centers are Europe, the USA, the Orient and Oceania. Early on, pundits remarked that countries like Japan did not get badly infected because they wore masks and culture provided a higher responsibility factor, plus, perhaps, some variation of the coronavirus must have reasonably recently somehow infected the general population (cold or flu, probably), leaving