“Like statistics in the hands of politicians, trend lines on...

“Like statistics in the hands of politicians, trend lines on graphs are often artifacts of mass deception…”

You seem to go on to say that if the UK, Taiwan and South Korea are removed from consideration, there is no trend remaining in the data.
My father had a colourful rejoinder for such conditional remarks.

If… If…. If your aunty had balls, she would be your uncle !!!
The unstated implication being that she doesn’t and she isn’t.

However, for the sake of the argument, I removed Taiwan, S. Korea, the UK and Sweden from consideration and fitted a trend line to the other countries on the chart.
As I noted previously, Sweden made itself an outlier by explicit policy choice, so it is reasonable to remove it from consideration.
None of the other countries on the chart admit to emulating Sweden’s “let-it-rip” approach, although the UK flirted with idea for a time.
Unsurprisingly, the trend of more deaths equating with more economic decline is weaker but the trend line still explains 27.5% of the y-ordinate variation, See revised chart below.

Perhaps of greater immediate relevance to the POG, is the trajectory of the pandemic as the Northern hemisphere winter approaches.
Here are a couple of “conditional observations” of my own on the implications of the graph for the USA further below..

If the fit between deaths and cases holds true, it looks like the US will chalk up 300,000 covid deaths by 10 December, equivalent to 906 deaths per million.
If the recent case number trajectory continues another six weeks, and the fit holds, the tally will get to 400,000 covid dead by inauguration day, on 20 Jan.
There will be more economic shutdowns in the Northern hemisphere and consequent stimulus spending before any vaccine takes effect.
You know it is grim when Boris Johnson commits to a new lockdown, especially with a vaccine in sight.
Indeed, with an apparently effective vaccine tantalisingly close, the argument for lock downs to stave of avoidable deaths and morbidity is even stronger.

Cheers