Its really interesting to see how the world fared. Granted its not over but the death toll continues as a modest fraction of the peak. From the start of 2020 to now is 29 full months with 6,885,926 reported deaths from covid. There’s demographic evidence that the toll was actually higher, and some countries never got their act together on reporting or supressed data, but sorting on deaths per million population serves as I think a fair litmus test on how each country fared.
It is worth seeing something like a fairly final and stable league table. Following are my random observations from the numbers:
Global mortality is 833 deaths per million, with cases about 10 times that.
Peru tops the fatalities at 6,551 p.m. - nearly 8 times the mean - followed by Bulgaria at 5,609.
The most dangerous place to be was the Balkans - there are 11 contiguous countries from Czechia to Greece in the top 20.
The USA comes in at No. 15 at 3,481 deaths p.m. Its neighbours did a lot better - Canada (83 - 1,366 p.m.), Mexico (39 - 2,540 p.m).
China comes in at 220 with 4 p.m. reflecting a humungous population and its zealous containment policy.
Sweden - subject to much debate about its strategy - is at No. 43 with 2,387 p.m. Its neighbours much lower rates - Denmark (79 - 1,483 p.), Norway (104 - 986 p.m.) and Finland (67 - 1,755 p.m.) - suggests the apologists for its laissez faire non-governmentalism are being disingenuous.
Uruguay and Paraguay did extremely well in the first half of the epidemic, despite being basket-case Brazil’s neighbours. In the end the borders were breached and they came in respectively at 49 and 32.
USA [click on it in the global list for a state breakdown] went from Arizona as the worst (4,605 deaths p.m.) - which was exceeded only by the five top countries - to Hawaii (1,350 p.m.). Ron de Santis’s Florida is 10th with 4,1,21 deaths. Why is this incompetence and failed policy not being brought forward in discussing his fitness to be president?
Australia had rigorous border controls and there were days when there were no new cases at all across the country. A switch to opening up took place in late 2021 with a rapid increase in fatalities. I think this was too soon and too quick, and there were still many unnecessary deaths. The Prime Minister at the time was deservedly given the heave-ho.
All in all a pretty grim tale. If it all feels like ancient history, I suspect the leaders whose failures are captured by these numbers want to encourage that rather than being held to account.
No democracy is going to prioritize equity over their own citizens. That just isn’t going to happen, especially not during a crisis like COVID was.
I also have a hard time believing that all those high population, low income countries like India, Indonesia, etc… have death numbers that are an order of magnitude lower than the US. Some sort of statistical shenanigans are going on there, I feel. I don’t buy that those countries both had fewer cases and fewer deaths than the US.
I don’t think it was shenanigans as much as lack of data. India doesn’t even report all their deaths. I mean, number of deaths. Some of them just never get officially reported. Of course they undercounted covid deaths.
In some regions - Africa especially - there seems to have been less susceptibility to catching covid and its severity, which was plain dumb luck, but you’re dead right about many of the numbers being odd.
But setting the US as the benchmark is not realistic either. Many countries may have impoverished health systems with low numbers of doctors and hospital beds per capita, but have good solid community health structures, and know how to run a health campaign or a vaccination program. Vietnam and Thailand were two examples where the advice on the ground and in the community was solid and strong.
I wasn’t setting the US as the benchmark, but just pointing out that it’s unlikely that the US was impacted in some kind of outsized way versus the rest of the world. That’s not true; we probably just have better record keeping and/or rules about what to count as a COVID death that aren’t in place in some other places
Maybe it’s something absurd like there are a LOT of frail old geezers in the US that would already be dead elsewhere who died of COVID in the US, and that’s why it looks like it hit the US harder. But that would be true across the developed world, and that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Yes, its hard to know. At the time obesity, co-morbidities like diabetes and general degraded health for oldies were all suggested as increasing mortality, but the argument about simply having lots of old people may resonate particularly in places like Florida. The age profile in Africa apparently skews very young compared to the West, and that was also claimed to suppress rates of infection.
The one thing more annoying than young people thinking they are bullet-proof is when they actually are.
If you want to actually know which countries performed best then the only sensible approach to take is to look at excess mortality over the pandemic period. That gives the most accurate picture of how a country fared and what the cumulative effect of the response was.
There is no consolation in having a low death rate from the virus if you end up killing more of your population in the long run through other causes.
When viewed in that way it is clear that this claim about strategy effectiveness
Is debateable at least (certainly when looking at figures up to mid 2022). Sweden’s excess death numbers are better than Finland and Denmark and almost identical to Norway.
There are other methods of calculating excess deaths and some extend that observation period into 2023 but they all tell a similar story. Sweden’s approach resulted in one of the lowest numbers of excess deaths in the world and by some metrics the lowest in Europe.
I agree that excess deaths will be truer and get over the record-keeping / deliberate under-reporting issue. Where did you get the numbers - do they cover just Sweden and neighbours or more extensive? Serbia - which is anomalously low in the centre of the Balkan peak region - is the one I’m interested in.
Sadly, being low in Europe was made much easier by the contiguous disaster in the Balkans.
The link I gave in my post is from the UK Office of National Statistics and looks at 33 European countries (and it in turn gets the figures from Eurostat)
Fig.4 is the interesting one for me, it shows Sweden’s excess deaths right near the bottom in comparison to other countries and dropping relatively as time passes (i.e. Sweden is nearer the bottom now than it was a year earlier). A question I wonder is when do we draw the line and say that excess deaths stop being a reasonable indicator of pandemic strategy success? Now? six months ago? 5 years from now? I don’t know the answer to that.
And no, Serbia doesn’t seem to be in there but other Balkan countries are.
No problem, I see what you mean, it blends on my screen too. I tried to post the link so that it previews but my browser doesn’t seem to like it and it crashes.