Thread by @danielgoyal

Now that Covid is over (🤦‍♂️) let's look at how the High Income Countries have performed.

▪️Covid deaths
▪️Excess deaths
▪️Mortality rates
▪️Vaccination Rates
▪️Loss of freedoms
▪️Economy.

How did your country do?

🧵

Total number of civilians lost to Covid.
This will likely be the measure most recorded in the history books.

Note the over ten-fold difference in deaths between those who suppressed the virus prior to vaccine and anti-viral treatments being available.

There are though other impacts of Covid defining success. A big one is the impact on other healthcare services. Difficult to measure in its totality but here is overall excess deaths....

This is how many people died who wouldn't have had Covid not appeared.

There is also the issue of overall chance of dying from Covid over the pandemic. Overall case fatality rate has some use here.

Protecting a population from the virus prior to their being a vaccine or treatment gave a ten-fold reduction in chance of dying from Covid over 2 yrs.

Here is how many tests conducted per positive cases found. Can affect case fatality rate.
(Qatar has been removed as it has 10 X higher than all other countries).

VACCINATION!
How did the countries do with vaccinating their population?

Fully vaccinated (X 2). [some HIC data are absent]

These are the number of boosters administered per 100 people.

Hong Kong and the US are really paying for their failure to deliver or convince their population to get vaccinated/boosted. Misinformation and mistrust in government is deadly!

So there you have it. At the moment so many countries declare their efforts to contain the virus over, we can see how many lives have been saved by those who managed to control the virus in the early stages.

Of course the pandemic isn't over, some leaders have simply given up

Some argue that the cost of containing the virus early was not worth the restriction to freedoms. But...

...effectiveness and timing of interventions determined both Covid (and non-Covid) fatality rates AND the time a nation needed to spend restricted.

Here is UK versus NZ.

The UK spent nearly three times more days in national lockdown and much longer under restrictions than NZ.

Look at this graphic of when countries decided to lockdown. The lateness of the UK was very very costly...

[March 18th, most HICs had put controls in...UK hadn't]

And the economy suffered!

A pandemic is a test of leadership and a country's infrastructure. Some have demonstrated good, trusted leadership and solid foundations. For others, Covid has exposed more than just the vulnerability to new pandemic pathogens.

I hope we learn before the next pandemic/variant!