The COVID-19 pandemic

[plam]

Not perfect, but some countries much better than others. Canada is sort of lower mid pack, but there are definitely countries that have done far worse. Greece for instance did relatively well. I think that countries which were scared of their health system not being able to cope actually went a lot harder and did better. (Greece has about two-thirds the population of Ontario and has a 7-day average of 826 vs Ontario's average of 1657; total cases for Ontario 277k, Greece 160k).

So, let's look at not-tiny high-income countries (including EU countries), and group into rough buckets based on the number of cases per million (since last year -- looking at current data is not right as the timing of the waves has varied greatly), in decreasing order of number of cases per million:

• 80K+: Montenegro, Czech Republic, Slovenia, USA
  
• 60K-80K: Portugal, Israel, Lithuania, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland
  
• 40K-60K: Netherlands, Sweden, Croatia, UK, France, Slovakia, Austria, Italy, Poland
  
• 20K-40K: Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Denmark, Bulgaria, Germany, Canada
  
• 10K-20K: Iceland, Greece, Norway
  
• 5K-10K: Finland
  
• -5K: Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan
  

Apart from Asia-Pacific countries, only Greece and (most of) the Nordic countries have fewer cases per million. So, personally, I would not characterize this as "lower mid-pack", as much as we love to slam our politicians. 

Czech Republic is interesting, they did really well initially and then stuff happened. Slovenia is actually even tinier than NZ, at 2 million vs 5 million in NZ. Maybe the correct assessment, based on number of cases, is upper mid-pack, but based on deaths (especially in LTC) is worse? Although even then, looking at deaths per 1M pop for today, Canada is surprisingly not bad. I'm surprised because I had compared Switzerland to Quebec and found way more cases in Switzerland but fewer deaths. Perhaps it's a story about how Europe really stuffed this one up.

And while I'm surfing data, the same set of countries, but now ranked by the number of vaccine doses per 100 people:

• 60+: Israel
  
• 10-20: UK, USA
  
• 5-10: Denmark
  
• 4-5: Iceland, Ireland, Romania
  
• 3-4: Lithuania, Slovenia, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, Portugal, Slovakia, Greece, Germany, Finland
  
• 2-3: Sweden, Czech Republic, Belgium, Canada, France, Norway, Austria, Croatia
  
• 1-2: Netherlands, Latvia
  
• 0-1: Bulgaria
  

Canada is maybe 25% below the weighted EU average. No significant vaccination activity in Asia-Pacific yet.

Israel, the UK, and the US all have special situations: Israel is small and got a special deal in exchange for data. The UK and US are manufacturing vaccines. Denmark is interestingly high up there.

The Pfizer vaccine just got approved earlier this week in NZ. Australia's saying that it expects to start vaccinating by the end of February but Jacinda Ardern nicely threw some shade and said "we don't really know when it's coming", and Australia and New Zealand should have the same priority. The promise in NZ is that border staff should be vaccinated by the end of first quarter (should take 3 weeks once it arrives) and mass vaccinations in the second half of 2021. Which is slightly concerning to me in terms of things lining up with when I go back to Canada vs vaccine availability.