EU Peak Covid Deaths, US Peak Cases
COVID-19 deaths/person in the EU and UK are about the same as the US this week, as they are in Germany and France. Italy is considerably higher and Spain lower.
But…
Peaks in deaths continue to occur a few weeks after case peaks, as expected. EU, UK, Italy and France all had peaks in early November. Rising caseloads in the US accelerated in October and are at record levels now, much higher than the peak cases in the UK and EU, about the same as the peak in Italy and lower than the peak in France.
This means that, even if recent state efforts to encourage/order masks and social distances flattens or cuts case rates now, over the next month, our death rates should soar above EU and UK and rival France and Italy. Of course, if caseloads continue to rise in the US, so much the worse for deaths in January.
A few puzzles in the data: Cases peaked higher in France than in Italy, but deaths peaked higher in Italy. German case loads were briefly almost as bad as the US in early November but then flattened while the US doubled, but now the German death rate is almost as high as the US. The exact relationship between deaths in a given week and the cases over the previous 2-6 weeks is somewhat unclear, and it may be that Germany’s death rate will flatten as the US’s rises.
The country most like the US is Canada. It’s case load seems to be flattening out at a third that of the US’s rate, with deaths following suit.
A death rate of 10 people per million per day does not sound like much. Continued over the whole US for a year, that works out to about 1.2 million deaths. Hopefully the vaccine will stop COVID by summer. Yet it is clearer than ever that the people dying of COVID in 2021 would have lived if they had just avoided the disease for a little longer.