Dramatic differences in pre & post-vax results around the world

And a new dashboard!

I have heard/seen anecdotal accounts that the dynamics around COVID cases and deaths around the world have changed. Curious to be able to quickly flip through what is happening, I decided to create a dashboard that I believe is easy to navigate and quickly investigate different country’s data. All of the data is from source from Our World in Data. My contribution is just a new dashboard that I think more quickly allows one explore.

An example of the dashboard view for France (as with all my dashboards, best viewed full screen on a large monitor):

Explanation (clockwise from upper left):

• Upper left: Simply a world map where you can click on the country(s) for which you would like to display the data.

• Upper right: Time series of New COVID Cases per Million (orange line) and % of population fully vaxxed (green)

• Lower right: Time series of New COVID Deaths per Million (orange line) and % of population fully vaxxed (green)

• Lower left: This is a Treemap view of the COVID deaths. Each box represents a week, beginning the week or January 1, 2020. The size of the box is represents the relative number of deaths for the selected country(s) in that week (larger box=more deaths). The color represents the % of population fully vaxxed from 0-100% on a red-green scale. For example, in the above view of France, we see almost all of the high death weeks occurred when vaccination rates were 0 or quite small (note this aligns with the time series on the lower right).

The United States and several of the European countries where the major media often focuses its attention looks similar to France.

United Kingdom

Germany

United States

In each of the four cases above, we huge peaks in cases well after the vaccine became very widely deployed. Despite this, we see smaller number of deaths than we did pre-vaccine (most pronounced in the UK, least in the US). So, in these major western countries, the mainstream has largely adopted the line that vaccines don’t prevent cases (although few are willing to explore the possibility that they have accelerated cases). A problem with this explanation, however, is that there are quite a few countries in the world where the above pattern does not seem to hold at all….

Norway

Finland

Japan

South Korea

Australia

New Zealand

I have to think through a good empirical way to test this thought, but in just looking at the charts of COVID deaths over time, it sure looks to me like the countries who have had relatively few post-vax COVID deaths had a great number of pre-vax COVID deaths, while we have the opposite story in the last six countries where there were very few pre-vax COVID deaths, but large peaks post-vaccine. This would tend to favor a theory that every place on the planet is likely to experience at least one serious wave of deaths, regardless of vaccination, and it is the accumulation of natural immunity and the unfortunate deaths of the most vulnerable in previous waves that lead to less deaths moving forward.

As always, other thoughts and ideas welcome. Also, please comment on whether this new dashboard is useful and any additions/modifications you might like to see.