Analysis – Saturday, 11 December 2021

Everything On Course - But Not To The Better
In spite of big hopes, 2022 might not be the year when Covid-19 will be overcome

Germany's official caution that the falling incidence might be linked to health and statistics authorities no longer being able to handle the increased amount of data. The good news: Germany is vaccinating like crazy, only Honduras and Bangladesh are administering more daily jabs. Like Britain, the new jabs are predominantly booster vaccinations because it is becoming increasingly evident that three vaccine doses are key to protect not only against the still-prevalent Delta variant but also against Omicron (BBC), which is expected to be the dominant variant in most of Europe by the end of the year.

This lack of a sufficient coverage of third (booster) vaccinations might explain why new infection numbers are exploding in Spain, which has otherwise a 2-jab vaccination rate of over 80% but only 13% of the boosters. The 2-jab vaccination does protect against severe disease though and thus ICU (ITU) and death number remain well below those of Germany, France and Britain.

In the USA, the virus has, again, found an ally in a public official. This time it is a judge in Missouri, whose ruling prompted the local health department to abandon Covid-19 health measures (ars technica). It is a safe guess that numbers in Missouri are soon going into territories for which the English language has no adjective. With a sizable number of US citizens "believing" that the government if faking death numbers (ars technica), other US states with a susceptible population won't have a positive outlook for 2022 either. Even for 2023, Bill Gates (the one trying to microchip all of us through the jabs) sees only hope if the usual suspects are in place, meaning vaccine and masks (CNN). One of the better-faring states is Washington, where numbers will remain clearly above the satisfactory level but there should not be a surge into Missouri territory.

Tunisia's numbers have made the projected turnaround but remain extremely low. But: the real infection rate is probably 6x higher than reported, but even that would be low. Omicron and a too-low vaccination rate could make things much worse than originally projected by IMHE. Their projections are now almost a month old but the institute has not released more recent data.