The COVID-19 pandemic

[tomh009]

I've usually said that I rate Canada's response as a D-. I was just talking to a NZer who lives in the US and is back in NZ for a few weeks. I realized that Canada's per-capita death rate is about half of the US's. (Specifically, 1/2.5th). Which is, well, less than half, but a lot higher than it should be.

It's all about long-term care. All the developed countries with high death rates got hit in a big way in long-term care facilities. Some of the top countries, deaths per million:

• Belgium 1,467
  
• Spain 985
  
• Italy 961
  
• UK 884
  
• USA 853
  
• France 829
  
• Sweden 698
  
• Switzerland 604
  
• Netherlands 561
  
• Austria 404
  
• Canada 328
  
• Germany 219
  
• Denmark 149
  
• Finland 74
  
• Norway 65
  
• Australia 35
  
• Japan 18
  
• South Korea 10
  
• New Zealand 5
  
• Taiwan 0.3
  

I don't think it's realistic to compare ourselves to the Asia-Pacific countries, for multiple reasons. But, like the European countries, we imported a lot of cases early on due to travel, the age structure is similar, and the political/cultural environment is fairly similar. There, most of the Nordic countries (bar Sweden) have done well as has Germany. But Canada's death rate is significantly lower than most of the others. So, if we get a D-, a whole lot of countries get an F. And maybe only Taiwan gets an A.

I haven't thought too much about the interval between, say, January and September-Octoberish, where I expect enough vaccines to have been dispensed. (If you think about just the vaccination process, it is a lot of vaccines that are going to need to be injected!) But even after the health care workers are protected, it just means that we keep health care capacity at what it is now, minus burnout; it doesn't have a significant effect on the number of people who would otherwise get it.

As soon as we start getting people vaccinated, the number of potential virus carriers starts dropping, bring down the R values. It won't be a big number at first, but every vaccination makes a difference, regardless who it is.