John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
Jul 18, 2021 18 tweets 6 min read Read on X
NEW: probably the most important Covid chart I’ve made

As Delta goes global, it’s a tale of two pandemics, as the heavily-vaccinated Western world talks of reopening while deaths across Africa and Asia soar to record highs

My story with @davidpilling ft.com/content/fa4f24… Image
Here’s another version, zooming in on the last few months.

In two well-vaccinated European countries, weeks of surging cases are reflected by only a sliver of deaths.

In eight countries where very few are vaccinated, surging cases are mirrored in surging deaths as before. Image
A grim gulf is opening up between the wealthy, mostly vaccinated world and the poorer, mostly-unprotected.

In the UK, vaccines have reduced the case-fatality rate roughly 12-fold, from ~2% to 0.16%

In Namibia, Tunisia, Malaysia and Indonesia, death rates have never been higher.
For those of us in the UK, US and Europe it’s easy to feel like the pandemic is on its way out.

But tell that to the people of Gauteng province in South Africa (home to Johannesburg and Pretoria), where the current wave has produced more deaths than any wave before. Image
And as ever, those numbers understate the true toll.

Johannesburg alone has recorded 5,635 excess deaths from natural causes in this wave, 40% more than the official total of Covid deaths for the whole province.

Jo’burg’s current death rate is worse than London’s in April 2020. Image
To be clear, the Western world is not out of the woods yet either.

In England, hospital & ICU admissions are now above the level where restrictions were introduced last year and continue to rise at the same rate as in previous waves.

Tomorrow England completes its reopening 🤔 Image
And that’s a country where 95% of people aged 65+ have been fully vaccinated.

In the US, far fewer elderly people are vaccinated, especially in certain states, and this could have a dramatic impact on how their Delta wave unfolds in terms of severe outcomes. Image
Indeed, hospital and ICU admissions are already rising faster (in some cases much faster) in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri and Nevada than they did in the winter wave last year.

That’s a marked contrast to the situation in England. Image
Here’s the same data plotted relative to the winter peak.

Florida and Missouri already have more Covid patients in ICU now than they did at the same stage of their winter wave. Other states are heading that way. Image
You may also have noted Catalonia (Spain) on those last two charts, another location where hospital and ICU admissions are following very similar paths to the pre-vaccine waves.
Essentially, a lot of places are finding out what happens when you reduce the risk of hospital admission per case (vaccines) but then multiply that ratio by a lot more cases (over-enthusiastic reopening with millions still unvaccinated).

The road ahead is anything but smooth.
It’s absolutely right that we (mostly-vaxxed countries) are having conversations about the way out of this. Endless restrictions can’t be the answer

There must be an acceptable level of risk, but what is that level? It’s not clear we’re currently below it
One option could be to follow France’s lead and further incentivise vaccination for the small proportion of people who have yet to get a jab

(story from @AnnaSophieGross ft.com/content/74ebba…) Image
Another could be to keep in place the most low-friction restrictions (e.g wearing masks in poorly ventilated indoor spaces) for an additional length of time, or during winter seasons.

Another option: requiring proof of immunity for admittance to mass indoor events.
Ploughing blithely on with reopening in the absence of any measures doesn’t have a great record so far.

The Netherlands rapidly u-turned on their reopening last month after cases rocketed. Catalonia has reintroduced a curfew. Image
In a sense, all eyes are now on England as a test case for whether "vaccinate all adults who want the jab, then reopen" is a blueprint for emerging relatively smoothly from the pandemic, or whether it’s promptly followed by another u-turn.
So there you have it.

As usual, please reply here or DM with any questions, feedback etc.

I’m hoping to dig more into the English data this week, and will keep tracking all of the metrics shown in the above charts.
(I update 20-30 Covid charts every day on the situation in the UK and abroad, but don’t usually have time to tweet them these days. If in future there’s a particular chart of mine here that you want to see an updated version of, let me know and I’ll do my best to provide it.)

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with John Burn-Murdoch

John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @jburnmurdoch

Mar 14
NEW 🧵: Is human intelligence starting to decline?

Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.

What should we make of this? Image
Nobody would argue that the fundamental biology of the human brain has changed in that time span. People’s underlying intellectual capacity is surely undimmed.

But there is growing evidence that the extent to which people can practically apply that capacity has been diminishing.
For such an important topic, there’s remarkably little long-term data on attention spans, focus etc.

But one source that has consistently tracked this is the Monitoring The Future survey, which finds a steep rise in the % of people struggling to concentrate or learn new things. Image
Read 15 tweets
Mar 7
NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.

The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west). Image
In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.

This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.

The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring. Image
In seven weeks Trump’s America has shattered decades-long western norms and blindsided other western leaders with abrupt policy changes.

This is because many of the values of Trump’s America are not the values of western liberal democracies.

My column: ft.com/content/304601…
Read 5 tweets
Feb 24
NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:

The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left. Image
Here’s my original analysis from last year: ft.com/content/29fd9b…
The key stats:

Young men’s AfD vote is somewhat higher than the national average (25% vs 21%), but their leftwing vote is also above average (15 vs 9).

Whereas young women’s AfD vote is significantly lower than average (14 vs 21), and leftwing vote far higher (34 vs 9).
Read 4 tweets
Nov 8, 2024
My wish for the next election is that poll trackers look like the one on the right 👉 not the left

This was yet another election where the polling showed it could easily go either way, but most of the charts just showed two nice clean lines, one leading and one trailing. Bad! Image
Pollsters and poll aggregators have gone to great lengths to emphasise the amount of uncertainty in the polls in recent weeks...

But have generally still put out charts and polling toplines that encourage people to ignore the uncertainty and focus on who’s one point ahead. Bad!
The thing about human psychology is, once you give people a nice clean number, it doesn’t matter how many times you say "but there’s an error margin of +/- x points, anything is possible".

People are going to anchor on that central number. We shouldn’t enable this behaviour!
Read 11 tweets
Nov 7, 2024
We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.

Some of those stories may even be true!

But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇 Image
Harris lost votes, Sunak lost votes, Macron lost votes, Modi (!) lost votes, as did the Japanese, Belgian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Lithuanian governments in elections this year.

Any explanation that fails to take account for this is incomplete.

More here ft.com/content/e8ac09…
Did Biden hold on too long?

Has progressive politics alienated some Hispanic and Black men?

Yes and yes, but taking action to address those issues probably wouldn’t have produced a fundamentally different outcome.
Read 7 tweets
Oct 18, 2024
The recent political polarisation of Silicon Valley is really striking.

25 years ago most big tech and VC execs were moderates. Then the whole sector shifted gradually leftwards up until 2020, and now suddenly we have a sharp divide into Democrat-backers and Trump backers. Image
Chart is from my column this week exploring how the politics of corporate bosses have evolved over time ft.com/content/29426c…
Thanks to a brilliant new analysis from @reillysteel, we know the overall shift has been towards the left, but there are lots of other interesting things going on beneath the surface too Image
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(