Mortality Is Now Sole Measure Of Severity Of Covid-19
Its course over the three years might give interesting insight into the future
I adjusted the scale on all graphs to put more emphasis on the lower end, because this is where death numbers are going. Or should be.
Mortality is one of the two variables left for gauging the severity of the still-ongoing pandemic (only the WHO can call an end, not national health authorities, as much as they are trying).
The other still-dependable indicator is the hospitalisations. But this number has been oscillating around the same level for the last 12 months in all five nations in my blog, and it is thus likely that ITU/ICU occupancy will not change much in the coming months either. Thus hospitalisations are currently a useless measure for predicting the future.
Lastly, incidences are severely undercounted, some scientists estimate by as much as a factor 10, and have thus lost their significance quite a while ago.
The new scale brings out the existence of two shapes of the 3-year mortality curve: the mildly oscillating one that never really went down, even during the initial lockdown(s); and the wildly oscillating one that dropped dramatically during 2020 and/or 2021.
The USA and Washington State belong to the first group, together with Brazil and Russia. Mortality does slowly edge downward but it remains too high and it is doubtful that it will come down like in the second group.
This second group includes Germany and France where mortality is now slipping towards the lows of the first lockdown. (Note: keep in mind that at the lower end of a logarithmic scale, small changes will have a big effect on a graph.) Similar behaviour is seen India, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain and Spain, to name a few. Tunisia must be counted here as well although mortality is seeing a worrisome upswing in the last weeks.
And then there are countries with some mortality dip in 2020 and 2021 but whose curves remained elevated in the last 12 months. These include Canada and possibly Sweden, which has been the odd man out from the onset because they opted to have no initial lockdown at all. Both countries were once subject of this blog.
I posit that countries with the overall flattest mortality line will have a continued presence of Covid in the near future, whereas counties with highly fluctuating mortality have a chance to get their mortality down to almost zero and Covid should then pose less of a threat.
No remarks this time.