But that would only explain this if other countries were testing more than us. Which could be the case but isn’t definitely (at least not to the degree that would explain this difference).
I looked a bit for age group breakdowns of vaccination rates in lagging States, but only found demographic breakdowns by race & ethnicity. Anyone know where to find vaccination data by age for places like Louisiana?
European countries and Israel have much, lower positivity rates than many regions in the US.
I give two thumbs up to naming this the DeSantis variant instead of Delta. Both start with a D
On top of that, both D and Delta are the fourth letters in their respective alphabets!
A lot of valid points have already been brought up, particularly vaccine rates. But there’s another factor we might need to consider as well and that’s the health of those who are getting sick and their underlying factors (obesity and related problems being a big one in the U.S.).
But that was also true during previous waves, and the overall mortality rate was very similar between the US and and those countries.
That’s why this is so perplexing, whatever the cause (or causes) it is something that was the same between the US and elsewhere during the first waves, but different between the US and elsewhere in the fourth waves.
Well, yes, the difference this time is that the major surge is striking areas that are less vaccinated.
In previous waves, it did hit different parts of the country but everybody had the same immunity going into it, i.e. not much at all.
Now, deaths are more concentrated in areas that are less vaxxed, and hospitals in those areas are also being overwhelmed, meaning higher death rates than we would otherwise had.
If we had more uniform vaccination rates and a more uniform case load, we wouldn’t see as many deaths because those patients would be more uniformly divided across the country. Instead, there are open hospital beds in Massachusetts while Arkansas is trying to find hospitals beds hundreds of miles away while patients are waiting hours or days for a free bed or room, often in hallways.
So, to expand on this, we have some stats from the CDC:
Looking at Massachusetts, over the last 7 days, they’ve performed 3075.5 tests per 100k people, had 75.6 cases per 100k, and 0.2 deaths per 100k people.
By contrast, Arkansas over the last 7 days has performed 1873.02 tests per 100k people, had 524.9 case per 100k, and 4.8 deaths per 100k people.
So, two different states and two wildly different results. Performing only 60% of the tests per capita but having nearly 7 times as many cases per capita and 24 times (!) the number of deaths per capita in the last week.
Pandemic mitigation measures (including vaccination) are a pretty clear difference. I know that’s not a palatable answer, but the cause in the difference is really clear in the data.
We’re NOT seeing a difference in between the entire US and elsewhere in the world. We ARE seeing a difference in particular regions within the US and elsewhere. Those regions are getting overwhelmed.
Could be that Americans are just unhealthier in general. Obesity, for instance, was/is a major contributing factor in Covid mortality. Maybe Americans are significantly fatter than Europeans and Israelis. And aside from fat, perhaps other unhealthy habits as well.
Sounds like a “just so” story.
Parts of the US look a lot like Europe or Israel, case and death wise. Other parts, not so much. And while obesity is greater in the South than elsewhere (I thinK?), it’s not 20 times greater. Again, treating the US as a single bloc for COVID does not make sense. Trying to get national level answers for a national level statistic when regional differences are so great doesn’t make sense.
But then, why isn’t Canada kind of in the middle of those two? We’re not as fat, on average, as Americans, but we are fatter than Europeans. If this were a major factor, you’d think Canada would show some effect of this, but I don’t think this is the case.
Screw “palatable”. The facts are the facts, and we need to stop coddling those who would ignore them for some stupid political reason. Start calling them out, loudly and rudely. People are dying, even more unnecessarily than last year, and it’s past time we got mad about it.
Hmmm. Maybe the vaccination rate for 65+ people is lower in the US than the rest of the industrialized countries. That would definitely alter the death rate in the recent wave.
The first wave hit many European countries hard before it really hit the US (with exceptions like NY). So their death rate was understandably high. Plus a lot of European countries have a high average age. The big winter death rate was shortened by vaccination of the elderly in the US. Now that Europe is more vaccinated than the US (especially the elderly), I really think that’s the difference in death rate now.
I don’t know why you continue to insist that it’s perplexing. It’s pretty clearly the result of some regions in the US having lower vaccination rates in the vulnerable demographic, i.e. old people. And that, in turn, is the result of the much greater politicization of covid in the US than elsewhere.
Really, this is just not at all mysterious.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html
According to the CDC
1 in 4.2 infections (due to covid) get reported.
1 in 3.8 symptomatic infections get reported
1 in 1.8 hospitalizations are reported.
1 in 1.3 deaths are reported.
However these numbers are pre-delta variant. The delta variant is mostly a disease of people who chose not to get vaccinated for one reason or another.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people who are sick are either in denial thats it covid, or they don’t want to admit they were wrong and their own stubbornness caused this to happen. I know I"ve heard stories of people in hospitals being verbally abusive to nurses because even as they were barely able to breathe they still said that covid was a hoax.
Maybe the covid death rate vs diagnosed infection rate is about the same as it was pre-delta (1 in 1.3 deaths due to covid is reported), but the rate diagnosed and reported for symptomatic and asymptomatic infections is far lower.
Which is scary in its own right, because aren’t we back at 200k officially diagnosed cases a day, or somewhere near that? Maybe the ratio is (as a guess) 1 in 6 now, which would mean a million or more people are actually catching covid daily.
On the plus side I guess it means delta would burn itself out fairly quickly if a million or more people are catching it each day.
Over 140,000 cases in the U.S. over each of the past two days. Current 7-day average is about 125,000, and one week ago it was 106,000.
Single day peak for the U.S. was about 308,000 cases on January 8, 2021. Highest 7-day average was about 255,000 on January 11, 2021.
In Western Countries other than the US the vaccination rates for the first groups offered the vaccination is way higher than in the US. In the UK for instance around 90% of those 60+ are vaccinated and even the age group 40-49 is over 75% vaccinated. For the US only 75% of those over 75 are vaccinated. The CDC dashboard annoyingly reports the percentage of the total vaccinated in each age group, and I’m not going to do any other groups by hand.
I think the disparity in vaccination rates for the oldest groups is a good indication that the US has a much lower vaccination rate even in the most vulnerable groups, and with the addition of regional and other demographical heterogenity in vaccination rates it is no surprise that the US has higher mortality.
Yep. That’s it right there.
Vaccination data for 65+ is readily available both nationally and per state. Overall the US has fully vaccinated 81% of 65+ with 91% receiving at least one shot. (source, NY Times COVID vax pages) Seems unlikely that we’re that far behind other nations in the 65+ demographic, aside from local variation - some counties in Alabama, Arkansas and Missouri have under 50% full vaccination even for 65+ - and the correlation to higher case rates in those counties is clear.
I calculated these numbers by using the numbers on the CDC’s page on the demographics of vaccinations, which said that as of yesterday just over 16 million 75 plus were vaccinated, and that they were 7 percent of the population, and then I forgot the actual results, which were less than 70%. Apparently the demographic data doesn’t include Texas, but subtracting Texas from the denominator doesn’t get us anywhere near the 80% that CDC’s other summary, quoted by @pdhenry, states.
I assume the CDC, who starts with the raw data, has the right calculation though. So the status for older American’s is not as dire as I though.