Is Italy a bellwether? Both their case rate and their mortality rate are trending back up, and case rates have also turned upward in France, Germany, Denmark, Austria, and other countries. Europe needs to get its vaccination program working pronto.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 15. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
I live in Canada (I moved back after 17 years last August so my nickname needs to change) and, as your graphs show, we are currently doing quite well at keeping Covid-19 infection rates and deaths under control inspite of a slow vaccination rollout. My point is that vaccination is only one of many ways of getting the virus under control. The most sucessful countries at controlling the virus have kept infection rates low from the beginning and acted quickly to control outbreaks. Vaccination can be delayed in areas where the infections rates and low and not raising. The US , UK and rest of Europe have had poor results because they have emphasised vacicination over reducing infections as much as possible. Delaying shutdowns and relaxing retrictions too soon have been disastrous.
Yup. The UK still has twice the current deaths compared to Canada despite having 36% vaccinated compared to 7% for Canada.
The trends in cases and deaths in the US suggest to this layperson that we aren’t nearing herd immunity yet. States that had early-2020 severe outbreaks, e.g. New York and Massachusetts, had even higher peaks in late 2020/early 2021. The US as a whole has now had three peaks, each higher than the last. The virus seemed to have had little trouble finding ‘naive’ hosts over the last year, which would mean that those speculations, that actual cases were 5x or 10x the diagnosed cases, were wrong. (I suppose it is possible that people who were non-symptomatic the first time they were infected can become re-infected and symptomatic later, but is that likely? If they had been symptomatic on first infection, re-infections would not pass unnoticed, yet we have virtually no known re-infections)
New York has had its case load slowly going down since late January. Yet hospitalization has fallen. Try harder.
January was a peak, deaths and hospitalizations are still higher than they were last summer.
Come back in another month............I think you may find some nuggets.
We're only at 25% vaccinated, so yes a long way to go.
Massachusetts gets its first Brazilian...: https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2021/03/16/massachusetts-brazil-coronavirus-variant
🙂
that's not good....
Cases aren't up that much though outside Italy and the Paris area. The supply is there, older people just aren't getting it. It's already ramped up.