Analysis – Saturday, 24 April 2021

Vaccination Roadblocks After Quick Start

Vaccination of roughly half of the population can be achieved relatively fast but seems to come to a crawl afterwards.

Scientists are divided on the virtue of herd immunity. Some say it is not necessary to achieve and that we should learn to live with the virus. Others say that we can reach a much higher percentage than with incentives (I doubt that) or with mandatory vaccination (I agree). The latter, however, will risk deepening the divide in already-divided societies such as in the USA.

We are now over a year into the pandemic and the press is still presenting sensationalist data. Last week's victim was India. The BBC (and almost all Western media) reported the largest daily increase in deaths of any country in the world. They might as well have reported the largest daily number of births because India is the most populous country and large demographic numbers are therefore to be expected. Of real concern is the steep rise of the numbers paired with an underdeveloped health care system. In fact, of the nations in my list, Germany, France, Tunisia, Sweden and the USA all have worse death data (per capita, of course). It is likely that India is underreporting their data  and it is almost certain that they will grow past the aforementioned nations, but that is not the point here.
I have included India's graph and numbers below and I will keep them until the press has moved on to another country for number exaggeration. Maybe they will regurgitate the story of China under-reporting their numbers because they cannot comprehend that numbers can be that low. (Hint: any country that took decisive and drastic actions in or before February of 2020 has low numbers. It is that simple).

Otherwise, the week brought the following:

The Good:

Britain's death and ICU numbers are declining, in most likelihood because the population has been vaccinated down to the 40+. But Britain's incidence is going flat, because the virus is still being passed among the non-vaccinated younger population.

The So-So:

Germany, France and Sweden are catching up nicely with their vaccinations, but ICU and death numbers are still rising, whether more slowly than without vaccination of the elderly cannot be proven. Their incidences keep going up, because the younger have a greater potential to pass the virus around (they see more people at schools, universities and work places) than the old. Reversing the vaccination order might have been beneficial (see Remarks below).

USA's incidence and fatalities have gone flat since mid March, at which time ICU occupancy began to rise again. The U.S. has traditionally had a great percentage of people who put belief before knowledge and a lot of them have supported Trump in the last election. A sizeable number of them are probably not amenable to vaccination at all, which will leave the U.S. vulnerable to renewed surges.

Washington State sees a rise in incidence but death numbers are keeping steady at a very low level. It is unclear what to make out of this but, like for the U.S., a lot of people will never get vaccinated and they will keep the incidence up.

The Bad:

Tunisia's incidence is skyrocketing and the deaths are projected to increase until mid May. The government has closed certain schools but cafés are still open and I hear that people are very sceptical about the vaccination.

Brazil's numbers are bad but they are becoming a little better.