Disappearing Benefits of Covid Countermeasures

Whatever the measures taken and the Covid mitigation successes in the past, the last year made everyone more equitable than before.

Remember the draconian travel restrictions and quarantine measures of the antipodes (New Zealand and Australia) in 2020-2022, or Japan, not to mention China? Like letting Djokovic play at Australian Open would undermine the public order and wipe out half the population of that island nation? They tried to protect and isolate their herds from the outside corrupting influences the best they knew. And it seemed to have worked. See the cumulative stats on Covid deaths and notice New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Norway, Finland, Denmark at the very bottom of the pack:

Here’s also all-cause excess mortality data for the same period:

Fast-forward to today. What a difference a year makes! After all have been jabbed through multiple rounds, and the rest either physically eliminated or naturally recovered, the time came to reap the benefits of all the hard work put into “vaccinations”, protection of the vulnerable and other mandates, and be finally able to safely let go of the leash. And what do we see in the last 12 months?

No matter of the past track record, the end result is much more homogeneous than one would have expected. What’s more, Finland is now way up there in the stratosphere, Denmark and Norway trying to catch up. Japan is raking in deaths by leaps and bounds, Australia and New Zealand unremarkable.

And Romania and Bulgaria, the anti-vaxx countries, flanked by Switzerland, are not the bad apples of 2022 as one would expect:

Actually, Switzerland and Romania are the two bottom countries in the Covid-19 mortality competition of the last 12 months.

Here are the Covid death totals side-by-side for Feb. 2020 - Jan. 2022, and Feb. 2022 - Jan. 2023:

Some countries doubled, trebled, quadrupled, or more (NZ) the number of Covid deaths in the last 12 months, when all that could, have already been jabbed-and-boosted. All six least-deadly countries shot up by a huge margin. As compared to the totals for the previous two years, when people were mostly “unprotected” from the original hard variants and treatment protocols were essentially banned.

The 12-months excess mortality data is, unfortunately, incomplete for many countries:

Especially Canada and Australia stopped reporting these data since summer 2022, wonder why. But again, Finland, Japan, Norway, Denmark switched from laggards to leaders. But what important is the slope of the curves on the right-hand side. If the curve’s shape is convex, the deaths are picking up in pace. Austria, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Japan, Sweden are standouts in that department.

Can’t wait to see the results for 2023.