Covid-19 diary: Part 40

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 23, 2021

Most of my posts about the Covid-19 crisis have been focused on the United States. That’s partly because this is where I’ve lived all my life, but it’s also partly because from April 2020 through the first quarter of 2021, the U.S. suffered from the novel coronavirus more than nearly any other country on the planet.

I’ve checked the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center international death figures from time to time, and this nation has consistently fared among the worst in the world. The U.S. was 11th at the end of May 2020; 11th in early October 2020; 13th at the end of March 2021; and 18th as of this week. As I noted in October, many of the nations with higher Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 residents are quite small.

San Marino currently ranks fifth globally at 265.8 deaths per 100,000, but it’s only had 90 deaths, and its population is less than 35,000. Of the nations that stand ahead of the U.S. today, seven have had fewer than 10,000 Covid-19 deaths. Just three have had 100,000 or more such fatalities: Italy, the United Kingdom and Brazil.

As it happens, Brazil is second in the world in recorded Covid-19 deaths measured as an absolute value, with 441,691 on Thursday, May 20. It trailed only the U.S., with 587,874.

Although the United States had less than 4.3 percent of the world population as of July 1, 2020, it has suffered about 17.2 percent of the world’s novel coronavirus deaths*. The proportion used to be significantly higher, but surges elsewhere in the world and declines here have put the American share of pandemic fatalities on a down ramp.

The pandemic is not over here, but it is waning. Barring a radical shift in circumstances, it should continue to do so, at the very least until the fall or winter. Yes, we still need to vaccinate eligible individuals — only 49 percent of Americans have received at least one inoculation. But if declines in cases and mortality continue, our focus should shift to hot spots around the world.

India and Brazil are averaging 4,140 and 1,928 daily Covid-19 deaths over the past week, respectively. (The U.S. is third at 578.) The percentages of their populations who are partially vaccinated are 18 and 11, with only around 9 percent and 3 percent fully vaccinated. These nations need our help, as do places such as Argentina and Colombia, where daily deaths over the past week are at 505 and 420.

America should extend a helping hand to nations that are struggling with the pandemic. Not only is providing and distributing vaccines to these nations the humanitarian thing to do, it can help reduce the chances of a nasty variant emerging.

What can ordinary Americans do about this? They can contact the White House and urge the president to support vaccination campaigns in other nations. They can contact their representatives in Congress and ask them to fund international immunization groups such as Covax. And they can give to charitable initiatives such as the World Health Organization’s Go Give One, which can provide a vaccine dose to an overseas recipient for $7 apiece, or to advocacy groups such as Global Citizen, the ONE Campaign, and the Pandemic Action Network. (Many of these recommendations come from this Sigal Samuel article at Vox.)

It’s easy to turn a blind eye to other people’s suffering. But just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening.

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Footnote

* U.S. population on July 1, 2020, divided by world population on July 1, 2020:

332,639,102 / 7,693,348,454 ≈ 0.04324 ≈ 4.32 percent

U.S. Covid-19 deaths divided by world Covid-19 deaths on May 20, 2021: 

588,531 / 3,425,648 ≈ 0.1718013 ≈ 17.2 percent

The number of U.S. deaths cited here, which I took from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center COVID-19 Dashboard, is marginally larger than the number of deaths cited in the text, which comes from the the same center’s Mortality Analyses webpage. I have used the different figures in their respective contexts in order to preserve the Coronavirus Resource Center calculations, even though the numbers are so similar that using them out of context would only have introduced a minor error.

Sources: 

International Data Base, U.S. Census Bureau, accessed March 30, 2021. 

COVID-19 Dashboard, Center for Systems Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, accessed May 20, 2021. 
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