Over a third (over 333,000 per million) of high-income nations have tested positive for COVID:
But if you look at when cases rose the fastest (after March 2022), that wasn’t until the total number of COVID shots given out had exceeded 150 doses per 100 persons:
After doses exceeded 150 doses per 100 persons in high-income nations, then COVID began to spread like wildfire.
Officials tell us that the unprecedented spread of COVID had nothing to do with reaching a “herd immunity” level of COVID shot coverage — but that, instead, new-fangled variants like Omicron are to blame.
But disentangling causes here is likely more complex, because variants themselves could be related to the uptake of COVID shots (more shots ==> more variants). There is an incorporated (viable) mutation in the COVID genome every 16 days, leaving open the possibility of 23 new variants each year.
Those “23 kinds of COVID” will then compete with each other for dominance. But primary series rollouts and booster schedules seemed to lead to abrupt alterations in variant dominance, possibly due to the week-long immunodepression associated with each of the COVID shots.
On this view, the weakened immune systems of recently-dosed persons allowed for a “COVID playground” of overgrowth inside of them, which then resulted in a higher rate of mutation events (more replication ==> more chance for mutation).
Reference
[viable (incorporated) mutation rate is one mutation every 16 days] — Amicone M, Borges V, Alves MJ, Isidro J, Zé-Zé L, Duarte S, Vieira L, Guiomar R, Gomes JP, Gordo I. Mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 and emergence of mutators during experimental evolution. Evol Med Public Health. 2022 Mar 29;10(1):142-155. doi: 10.1093/emph/eoac010. PMID: 35419205; PMCID: PMC8996265. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8996265/
It's even worse than that because from around middle of 2022, the OWID data have been pretty useless. Based on small-scale cohort data, well in line with wastewater data, the number of Covid cases in Germany until the end of 2023 is approximately equal to population size (there have been multiple infections, of course; I had it at least three times, the first two of which are definitely not in the official data...).
Another piece in the jigsaw. The picture is getting clearer and clearer.