COVID-19 Retrospective

Deaths

Because deaths as a percentage of population is such a small number, the "Deaths-per-Million" metric shown in Figure 7A provides a comparable measure. It is different than mortality rate, which is a measure bases on deaths as a proportion of cases.

The same five countries were in the top-5 since June 2022, with USA, Chile and Brazil nearly tied for 14 months.

The Global curve for deaths-per-million showed a slow and steady growth, despite surges, vaccinations and variants that had a much more obvious influence on cases. In fact, it had been slowing ever so slightly until February when it bend upward again (put a straightedge on the global line and you will see that it is not straight, but gently curving).

Given lower death rates in European and Asian countries that experienced much higher surges in cases, it is striking that USA—whose case rate had been much more moderate—found itself in the company of countries with the highest death rates as measured by deaths-per-million-population.

That situation should lead to serious consideration of what could have been done better, especially as political and ideological division drove the split between over-zealous use of lockdowns in the name of Science and the ethos of a "don't tread on me" individualism, a division that soured the often heroic efforts of the health care system.

The five lowest of monitored countries by deaths-per-million at the end of the pandemic were all Asian and all five had appeared in this chart since October 2022.

While the other four countries had slowed at or slightly below the global pace, Japan had been climbing steadily since it joined the list of monitored countries in February 2022, before showing a noticeable slowdown in February 2023. By the end of April, Japan was in a near-tie with Philippines and Indonesia.

The Global rate of increase in deaths-per-million was very steady through March 2022 when it began a noticeable slowdown, even as BA-2 and other sub-variants began to emerge, adding to the widening gap between cases and deaths—the bit of good news in this pandemic.

As with the comparable chart for Rate of Change for Cases (Figure 6C), countries for Rate of Change for Deaths (Figure 7C) are selected based on the change over two-months (end of February to end of April) in reported COVID deaths. The focus of the selection is on recent changes, but the chart goes back 12 months for perspective.

While Asian countries had dominated for several months, by the official end of the pandemic, the picture for deaths had become more mixed. Germany moved into the top-5 in March and UK led the top-5 in April.

The global rate of change by month (red trend line) was between 1 and 2 percent all of the last 12 months of the pandemic.
While change among the top-5 countries had dropped noticeably by March and April 2023, with Taiwan showing no change in April, the chart shows how COVID deaths continued to spike in some Asian countries along with the reappearance of Europe in the chart.

The chart below shows the shift toward east Asia and Australia (Oceania) in recent months.

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Mortality Rate

Mortality Rates (percentage of deaths against reported cases) had generally been declining. There are many factors, which I have detailed in previous reports, but the most obvious is the gap between cases and deaths. For most of the last year, following the initial surges related to the omicron variant, cases continued to climb while the death rate nearly flattened in comparison. The wider the gap, the lower the morality. In that respect, as long as deaths can be held down, increases in cases should not be as alarming as they are sometimes made out to be.

That is why, I believe, most people felt COVID had become endemic—more like seasonal flu and the common cold—long before the official pronouncement by WHO.

We cannot, however, assume that lower death rates mean they are no longer consequential. As I have pointed out elsewhere in this report, deaths in USA ranked third among the leading causes of death in 2020 and even though the rate has slowed, COVID will remain in the top-10 causes of death for at least another year, if not longer.

The Global mortality rate had dropped from 2.6% in October 2020 to 1.0% by October 2022. The five countries with the highest (worst) mortality rates had appeared since December 2021, with South Africa and Indonesia trading places frequency in that time and still in a virtual tie at the end of April. All five showed some response to omicron, with cases rising faster than deaths, which drove the mortality rate down.

Even with the pandemic officially ended, a very slight uptick in mortality rates in the last three months is evident, possibly a result of the latest variant, nickname "Kracken," that some reports suggest could be far more significant.

Since these represent the best mortality rates, where low is good, the "rank" order is actually in reverse.

The same five countries have been on this chart since September 2022. All five were well below the global rate of 1.0$ and piling on top of each other at 0.3, 0.2 and 0.1%.

USA was stuck at 1.2% for six months before dropping to 1.1% in July 2022, where it stayed through April. Relatively speaking, that is a good mortality rate, yet one-third of the monitored countries, including Belgium, Germany and Netherlands had rates below 1.0% for 12 months or more, largely because huge omicron-related surges were not matched with a similar increase in deaths. USA should have been able to keep deaths much lower since the surges here were well below those experienced in Europe and parts of Asia. (It is ironic that had USA experienced higher case surges its mortality rate might also have dropped, but that would only happen if hospitalizations and deaths were kept down).

Even so, without a relatively low mortality rate, the USA death rate would be far higher. Compared to the mortality rate during the 1918 pandemic, it could be ten times worse than it is. At its current mortality rate of 1.1%,(above the global level) USA has had more than 1.1 million deaths (out of 105 million cases) by the end of April, As pointed out in Figure 1, however, if USA had cases closer to its proportion of world population, we would be looking at 355-thousand deaths out of 32-million cases. The response of the health care system and availability of vaccines are part of keeping mortality down, but the high case rate points to the conflicts already mentioned between opposing sides of the approach to COVID (extreme lockdowns in the name of science versus extreme individualism in the name of freedom).

How real is the threat of death from COVID? That's where successful mitigation comes in. Worldwide, by the end of April, 1 in 12 people have been reported as having contracted COVID and 1 in 1,167 people died. In USA, while the mortality rate was low, because the number of cases is so high, 1 in 289 have died through April 2023—between Chile (1 in 298) and Romania (1 in 280). Japan and Australia are at 1 death in 1,685 and 1,105 respectively (COVID in both countries, however, has increased to the point that both were added to my list of monitored countries and those numbers, while still in sharp contrast with USA, are moving in the wrong direction). A closer comparison would be neighboring but sparsely populated Canada, at 1 in 735, or Mexico, at 1 in 394, with most European countries between those two.

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Tests

The section on testing was reduced in size because of the availability of home testing is widespread and not tracked in the statistics. In addition, the statistics that are reported have shown no meaningful change for the past five or six months.

The point of inequality between countries still exists, however, so I continued to update the following list, which was originally based on the lowest five for testing, but now includes other pairs of similar-sized countries among the 34 I monitor. Remember, however, that the statistics here refer only to officially reported testing and do not include home testing. (Population numbers updated this month, based on "live" estimate from worldometers.info.)

• Mexico: 19.9M tests for 131.8M population, compared to Japan: 101.0M tests for 125.6M population (5.1X the tests)
• Philippines: 35.0M tests for 112.5M population, compared to Vietnam: 85.8M tests for 99.0M population (2.4X)
• Iran: 55.4M tests for 86.0M population, compared to Turkey: 162.7M tests for 85.6M population (2.9X)
• South Africa: 26.8M tests for 60.8M population, compared to Italy: 271.4M tests for 60.3M population (10.1X)
• Poland: 38.7M tests for 37.7M population, compared to Canada: 66.3M tests for 38.4M population (1.7X)
• Peru: 38.5M tests for 33.7M population, compared to Malaysia: 68.3M tests for 33.2M population (1.7X)
• Ecuador: 3.1M tests for 18.2M population, compared to Netherlands: 26.0M tests for 17.2M population (8.4X)
• Bolivia: 2.7M tests for 12.0M population, compared to Belgium: 37.0M tests for 11.7M population (13.7X)

Of the east Asian countries I monitor—most relatively recent additions because of surging cases—only Malaysia and Taiwan reported enough tests to cover their entire population. Otherwise, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, and Philippines were all at testing levels that would cover roughly a third of their populations. Yet, they remained among the monitored countries with the lowest mortality rates. While they may not have appear high in reported testing, they were all above global rates for fully vaccinated (from 87% for Vietnam and Taiwan, 86% for South Korea, to 83% for Japan).

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Vaccinations

Figure 9A compares USA with the top-5 and bottom-5 of monitored countries by total doses administered. As you can see USA leaned toward the upper countries, but like most of them, its total vaccination rate showed virtually no increase in April*, and that remained below the total doss for all of the top-5 and its total doses was below the full vaccination level for all but Argentina. On the other hand, USA remained well ahead of the bottom five of the 34 monitored countries for both total doses and fully vaccinated.

As pointed out in other parts of this analysis, Figure 9A does not tell the whole story. It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, with one major factor being the population of each country.

*Numbers for this chart come from ourworldindata.org. The CDC numbers, used in Figure 11, show similar results, with an increase of less than 1% per month in those fully vaccinated over the past fifteen months, to a total of 69.3% of USA population.

Taking population into account paints a somewhat different picture for USA compared to other monitored countries. In Figure 9B you see the five most populous countries on the left and the five smallest (of those monitored for this report) on the right.

China and Brazil remained ahead of USA, both in total total doses and full vaccination. USA was ahead of India and Indonesia in both total doses and full vaccination.

On the side of the smallest countries, Ecuador was ahead of India, USA and Indonesia. For a time the disparity between large and small countries was narrowing, but with vaccination rates leveling off by the end of 2022 that was no longer the case and any changes in the chart when they did occur were minuscule.

In USA and perhaps in other large countries, individual regions, provinces or states may be doing as well as some smaller countries, while the entire country lags behind the smaller ones.

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VACCINATIONS IN USA

A person is considered "fully vaccinated" two weeks after the final vaccine dose; roughly five to six weeks from the first dose for Pfizer and Moderna. A booster dose for both vaccines became available in October 2021 and a second booster updated for the latest variants became available late in 2022 (in Fig. 10 the curve for booster shots dropped in October because CDC switched its tracking from the first to the second available booster).

Figure 10 clearly shows that vaccinations began at a rapid pace. The red line for full vaccinations is lower than doses administered because if takes two does to be fully immunized. So, the first few months were on track, but then the curve for fully vaccinated began to flatten and rose by 1% or less each month since then. While the difference is small, the rate of increase for cases continued to climb at a slightly higher rate than those who are fully vaccinated.

On the positive side, doses administered continued to climb at a higher rate than cases, but that only means that more people were getting only a single dose and not going on to become fully vaccinated and then boosted. As we saw earlier, this makes USA's vaccination performance unimpressive compared to other countries around the world. Sadly, it may account for a death rate far higher than i could have been.

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CAUSES OF DEATH IN USA

In the first year of the pandemic media attention was focused on numeric benchmarks—causes of death, wars, the 1918 pandemic. When the CDC updated its leading causes of death list for 2020, COVID came in at third place, at 345 thousand deaths (in 10 months), behind heart disease (691K) and cancer (599K). When the table is updated again for 2021, it will show COVID at around 450 thousand for the full year. But by 2022, following the omicron variant, the number will drop to about 270 thousand, still possibly staying in third place. Enough deaths due to COVID will likely continue into 2023 to keep COVID in the top-10 when results for this year are announced. At the same time, cases in USA continued to rise, but until the death rate slows even more, mortality is likely to stay stuck around the 1.1% level when the pandemic officially ended. . . .

Note: As I've referenced in the notes for several charts, data from worldometers.info tends to be ahead of CDC and Johns Hopkins by about 3%, because of reporting methodology and timing. I use it as a primary source because its main table is very easy to sort and provides the relevant data for these reports. Such differences are also found in the vaccine data from ourworldindata. Over time, however, trends track with reasonable consistency between sources.

Perspective

The 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic is estimated to have struck 500 million people, 26.3% of the world population of 1.9-billion at that time. By contrast, we're now at 8.5% of the global population. Deaths a century ago have been widely estimated at between 50- and 100-million worldwide, putting the global mortality rate somewhere between 10 and 20-percent. It has been estimated that 675,000 died in the U.S.

IF COVID-19 hit at the same rate as 1918, we would have see about 2-billion cases worldwide by the time COVID-19 was over, with the global population now at 8.0-billion—four times what it was in 1918. There would have be 200- to 400-million deaths. USA is estimated to have had 27-million cases (one-quarter of the population of 108-million) and 675,000 deaths. Today, with a population of 333-million (a three-fold increase from 1918) this would mean more than 80-million cases, and 2- to 4-million deaths. We reached closer to one-third of the population with reported COVID infections, at 105 million; fortunately, deaths remain half that projection, at just over 1.1 million.

At the final rate of confirmed cases and mortality while the total number of global cases surpassed 500 million—comparable to 1918 in raw numbers—that is one-quarter of 1918 when taking population growth into account . .. and with the pandemic outlasting the Spanish Flu, which went on in three waves over a two year period. (We entered a third year in March 2022). We broke the global 500-million case benchmark in April 2022, propelled by delta and omicron surges since July 2021.

While we are not engaged in a world war as was the case in 1918, COVID-19 found the world fighting global fatigue and information overload. While many public officials were duly concerned, their pronouncements sometimes reached the level of "overstated threats" (a term I heard from people concerned about the growing tensions between China and USA) that only added to the fatigue and the growing distrust of our bedrock institutions (see my report on Confidence in American Institutions, an analysis of Gallup Poll data spanning nearly five decades).

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Maintaining Perspective

The following section was built up over many months and repeated here to show the important of maintaining dialogue and perspective in the midst of events like the COVID-19 global pandemic that have such far-reaching consequences for so many people.

In the tendency to turn everything into a binary right-wrong or agree-disagree with science or government, we ignore the need to recognize the nature of science and the fact that we are dealing with very complicated issues. So, in addition to recommending excellent sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it is also wise to consider multiple qualified sources.

While there has been much focus placed on trusting "the science," it is important to recognize that science itself changes over time based on research and available data. In the highly volatile political atmosphere we find ourselves in (not just in USA, but around the world), there is a danger of not allowing the experts to change their views as their own understanding expands, or of trying to silence voices of experts whose views are out of sync with "the science" as reported by the majority of media outlets.

In an earlier report, I mentioned the Greater Barrington Declaration, currently signed by more than 63-thousand medical & public health scientists and medical practitioners (and 869-thousand "concerned citizens"), which states "As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection."

For a personal perspective from a scholar and practitioner who espouses an approach similar to the Focused Protection of the Greater Harrington Declaration, see comments by Scott W. Atlas, Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, in an article "Science, Politics, and COVID: Will Truth Prevail?"

Several months ago on SeniorLifestyle I posted an article by Mallory Pickett of The New Yorker, "Sweden's Pandemic Experiment," which provides a fair evaluation of the very loose protocols adopted by Sweden, essentially a variation of the "Focused Protection" approach. The "jury is still out" on this one, so judge for yourself whether Sweden hit the mark any better than the area in which you live. It does make the case that given the overall approach to mitigation, surging cases do not necessarily lead to surging hospitalization and death, but actually result in lower mortality rates.

FROM PANDEMIC TO ENDEMIC: In November 2021 I posted on SeniorLifestyle an article by Sarah Zhang from The Atlantic, "America Has Lost the Plot on COVID." In it, she suggests that America (and the world) is headed not toward the eradication of COVID-19, but its transformation from pandemic to endemic, joining the seasonal flu as something we will deal with for some time. Getting there, she contends, is more a matter of mixed policy strategies than "following the science," but coming to grips with its inevitability could help lead to more effective strategies.

Zhang mentions Denmark as a counterpoint to what is happening in America, saying

One country that has excelled at vaccinating its elderly population is Denmark. Ninety-five percent of those over 50 have taken a COVID-19 vaccine, on top of a 90 percent overall vaccination rate in those eligible. (Children under 12 are still not eligible.) On September 10, Denmark lifted all restrictions. No face masks. No restrictions on bars or nightclubs. Life feels completely back to normal, says Lone Simonsen, an epidemiologist at Roskilde University, who was among the scientists advising the Danish government. In deciding when the country would be ready to reopen, she told me, “I was looking at, simply, vaccination coverage in people over 50.” COVID-19 cases in Denmark have since risen—under CDC mask guidelines, the country would even qualify as an area of “high” transmission where vaccinated people should still mask indoors. But hospitalizations are at a fraction of their January peak, relatively few people are in intensive care, and deaths in particular have remained low.

Crucially, Simonsen said, decisions about COVID measures are made on a short-term basis. If the situation changes, these restrictions can come back—and indeed, the health minister is now talking about that possibility. Simonsen continues to scrutinize new hospitalizations everyday. Depending on how the country’s transition to endemicity goes, it could be a model for the rest of the world.

Both Sweden and Denmark, illustrate a seeming irony, pairing super high case rates with extremely low mortality rates. Does this prove the point of Zhang's observation about focusing on the prevention of hospitalization? Or the Greater Barrington Declaration's "focused protection."?

Also see "How you'll know when Covid-19 has gone from from 'pandemic' to 'endemic'" by Sigal Samuel, in an October 2022 article on Vox.

Resonating with the growing discussion over the impacts of severe lock downs, columnist Debra J. Saunders wrote about the impact of school closures and the turnabout in thinking by some politicians who had been its strongest advocates. Her column was titled "Worse Than a Crime, a Mistake." Perhaps it's a bit of 20-20 hindsight, but it is another perspective on the "Focused Protection" idea that may help us better shape responses to future pandemics or similar widespread crises.

How we evaluate the many approaches used to deal with COVID will determine how we prepare for and approach the next global event—including the eventual transition from pandemic to endemic.

My purpose in mentioning these sources is to recognize that there are multiple, sometimes conflicting, sometimes dissenting, voices that should be part of the conversation. The purpose of these monthly reports remains first and foremost to present the numbers about COVID-19 in a manner that helps you understand how the pandemic is progressing and how the U.S. compares to the world—and how to gain more perspective than might be gathered from the news alone.

While the global pandemic has been declared over, COVID has no been eradicated. It will still have an impact as a pandemic in some countries and for most the world will continue as an endemic, added to the list of seasonal viruses we have to content with. There will be considerable reflection and analysis of this pandemic in years to come. My hope is that humility and wisdom will prevail over finger-pointing where mistakes were made, either by those blinded by their own inflexible views. In crisis as in everyday life, we need to be open-minded and flexible, realizing that situations change, understandings deepen, and we need to admit when we were wrong while building on what we got right to help us face the next extraordinary global event.

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Profile of Monitored Continents & Countries

(Data from worldometers.info). - Updated January 2023 after world population announced to reach 8 billion
While there was upward movement in population, density and median age remained the same at continental levels.

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Scope of This Report

What I track

From the worldometers.info website I track the following Categories:

• Total Cases • Cases per Million
• Total Deaths • Deaths per Million
• Total Tests • Tests per Million (not reported at a Continental level) - statistics still tracked but charts no longer used (see noted above)
• From Cases and Deaths, I calculate the Mortality Rate

Instead of reporting Cases per Million directly, I try to put raw numbers in the perspective of several key measures. These are a different way of expressing "per Million" statistics, but it seems easier to grasp.

• Country population as a proportion of global population
• Country cases and deaths as a proportion of global cases and deaths
• Country cases as a proportion of its own population
• Cases and deaths expressed as "1 in X" number of people

Who I monitor

My analysis covers countries that have appeared in the top-20 of the worldometers case and deaths categories since September 2020. This includes most of the world's largest countries as well as some that are much smaller (see the chart in the previous section). Vaccination data is taken from ourworldindata.org and CDC. Hospitalization date is found at ourworldindata.org.

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This article was originally posted on my InfoMatters blog.