![]() ![]() While American caseloads have been growing at alarming rates in certain parts of the country, the effects of vaccination are just as striking here. You get almost all of the old, many of the middle-aged, and frustratingly few of the young, who face the least risk from the disease itself. It may be the case that there is something of a natural social equilibrium, at least in this early stage of rollout, at about 60 percent of total population and 90 to 95 percent of the vulnerable elderly. Canada looks poised to become the world leader in vaccinations, after a slow start, with 52.6 percent of the country fully protected and no signs of slowing down ( though it hasn’t yet reached 90 percent of even it’s over-80 population). But among the truly vulnerable elderly, the rates across this cohort of countries are quite similar. There is surely some dampening culture-war and disinformation effect on vaccination rates here, and the gap between 49 percent and 58 percent is not insignificant - in the U.S., getting to 58 percent would mean 30 million additional vaccinations. is at 49 percent of its total population and 90 percent of its seniors. In England, 53 percent of its total population is fully vaccinated, and 94 percent of its over 50s. Israel has fully vaccinated 58.4 percent of its population and about 90 percent of those over the age of 60. And while, again, the death totals will likely continue to grow in the weeks ahead, over the same period of time, the country’s rolling seven-day death total has climbed from about 1.5 to 1.7.Īmericans fretting about our vaccination rates often point to those two countries as models, but, as with pandemic performance before the vaccines, when it comes to vaccine rollout, we may be less far behind our peers than we tell ourselves. According to the invaluable tracker at Our World in Data, the number of new cases has climbed from a peak below ten per day in early June to more than a thousand now, toward the end of July - a tenfold increase in about six weeks. ![]() If this holds up, it is likely that the country’s seven-day rolling death total during the Delta wave will peak, a few weeks from now, below 100. ![]() And it appears possible, at least, that for all the public alarm about British reopening in the midst of the Delta wave, that new case numbers may already have peaked and begun to decline. In the U.K., which has had, after India, perhaps the world’s most striking Delta wave, the infection fatality rate may have fallen as much as 20-fold from previous waves. Indeed, both in the United States and in those similarly well-vaccinated countries whose Delta waves precede ours, that is what we’ve seen. Almost certainly that relationship has been severed by mass vaccination, since the overwhelming majority of the most at-risk are now very well protected. But for most of the course of the pandemic, cases and deaths have guided our sense of the trajectory of the disease and proceeded together almost in lockstep. Death isn’t the only outcome worth worrying about, of course - being hospitalized or even ventilated is no happy outcome for anyone, and the possibility of long COVID looms over each case (though precisely how prevalent that phenomenon is remains up for debate). Photo: Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group via Getty ImagesĪt present, there are two big anchors to conventional-wisdom thinking on the Delta variant: that those already vaccinated remain exceedingly well protected against the new, more transmissible strain, and that those who aren’t remain exceedingly vulnerable.īut a third fact seems to me to be just as significant in assessing the COVID risks the country faces going forward: that the age skew of the disease and the age skew of vaccine penetration, taken together, mean that the country as a whole has probably had at least 90 percent of its collective mortality risk eliminated through vaccines. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California, on Wednesday. Nurses check on a patient in the COVID ICU at St.
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