Here’s the latest news from the pandemic.

What’s up with these death patterns? 

Covering the pandemic as journalists in Asia has required us to constantly evaluate case and death patterns, and our most insightful analyses have sometimes come from
comparing the situation in our region to the Europe and the U.S.

So it was with a new project that interrogated why highly inoculated places using the same vaccines are having different outcomes in
how deadly their delta outbreaks are.

It all started when I was dissecting Covid numbers in Japan last month with a colleague, and we noticed that while peak fatalities in its delta-driven wave had fallen compared to that of pre-vaccination outbreaks, the drop seemed less impressive than in the U.K.: Japan’s deaths after vaccination was about half its pre-vaccination peak, while the U.K’s was a 10th.

Expanding this to other major economies with more than a 55% vaccination coverage revealed that some countries like Germany and Denmark also suppressed deaths as much as the U.K.,
while others like the U.S. and Israel saw smaller drops in fatalities like Japan.

Virus experts can’t point to any definitive reason to explain these differences in outcomes. But it has become clear that it’s not just the type of shots or the extent of vaccination that counts in bringing down the coronavirus death toll globally.

Many other factors are at play. One could be the time interval between shots. Studies have shown that
waiting longer than the recommended three week interval between Pfizer shots, for example, actually creates a stronger immune response—many countries in Europe took this approach initially to stretch out supply, and saw an unexpected payoff.

Other factors like the age distribution of vaccinated people and how people behaved during delta waves also explain the difference in outcomes, as does how severe pre-vaccination waves were for each country. Still, there are valuable lessons to learn from the strategies of places where deaths have dropped the most after vaccination.

The data provided by the countries during the pandemic have given us a rich repository from which to analyze how best to handle the ever-evolving pandemic. As we near the third year of the Covid era, that’s more important than ever.—Lisa Du 

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