Even Triple-infection in 2022 doesn't explain Excess Death in Vietnam
Omicron is not lethal enough to explain death there
One of the slowest nations to roll out vaccines was Vietnam. By 19 Jul 2021, they had still only administered about 4 doses for every 100 people there.
But taking such a long time to get vaccinated appears to have helped Vietnam keep excess deaths low: No or very low vaccination = no or very low excess death:
Vietnam was only accumulating about 1 Weekly Excess Death per Million (WEDpM) until the vaccination campaign took off. In 2018 in the Netherlands, there was an average of over 10 WEDpM in a severe flu year — showing that Vietnam wasn’t even having the equivalent of bad flu (as long as they remained unvaccinated).
But as you can tell from above, after vaccinations began picking up in Vietnam, excess deaths began rising more or less unabatedly.
Because the majority of these excess deaths occurred during Omicron variant, you can project the number of infections required in order to explain the excess — by assuming that the excess death was due to Omicron infections.
A rough estimate on the number of Omicron infections required in order to produce one single death is 3000 infections. The problem is, in order to explain the excess death in Vietnam as being related to COVID, it implies 327 million COVID infections.
But Vietnam only has 97 million people in it.
On 27 Dec 2021, there were 99,156 excess deaths in Vietnam, but by 30 May 2022, there were 208,250 excess deaths — a 5-month difference of 109,094.
If Omicron infections were to explain these extra 109,094 deaths over that time span, and it takes 3000 infections with Omicron, just to produce one single death, then 327 million COVID infections would be required.
Even using a reduced estimate of 1500 Omicron infections to get one death, you still end up with way more infections than people.
Evidence suggests that it was the COVID vaccine itself that is causing all of that excess death in Vietnam, because the dominant variant in circulation is not lethal enough to explain that amount of death.
Reference
[Total COVID-19 vaccine doses administered per 100 people] — OWID data. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
[Cumulative Excess Death (The Economist)] — OWID data. Available: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
[Just 12 deaths from 37, 296 Omicron infections (1 death per 3108 infections)] — Ulloa AC, Buchan SA, Daneman N, Brown KA. Estimates of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Severity in Ontario, Canada. JAMA. 2022 Apr 5;327(13):1286-1288. doi: 10.1001/jama.2022.2274. PMID: 35175280; PMCID: PMC8855311. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2789408
[From 1.5 million confirmed cases, Omicron is 31% as lethal as Delta (IFR ~ 0.03%), making Omicron much safer than the seasonal flu] — Nyberg T, Ferguson NM, Nash SG, Webster HH, Flaxman S, Andrews N, Hinsley W, Bernal JL, Kall M, Bhatt S, Blomquist P, Zaidi A, Volz E, Aziz NA, Harman K, Funk S, Abbott S; COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, Hope R, Charlett A, Chand M, Ghani AC, Seaman SR, Dabrera G, De Angelis D, Presanis AM, Thelwall S. Comparative analysis of the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England: a cohort study. Lancet. 2022 Mar 16:S0140-6736(22)00462-7. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00462-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35305296; PMCID: PMC8926413. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8926413/