In a recent Substack, I introduced a method of comparing COVID mortality in nations based on their respective percentage share of elderly. When exposure level is similar between nations, then 90% of variation in death is explained by age.
If a 65 year-old gets COVID, then he or she is 167 times more likely to die than a 25 year-old. And over 70% of all COVID death is death among the elderly. These facts make it so that nations can be compared, after you account for the differences in age structure.
A crude method would be to use the nation which implemented the least mitigation measures, because the mortality in THAT nation would represent the mortality from COVID, free of the confounding effects of nationwide mitigation measures.
A Good Benchmark
That nation, as you may have guessed, is Sweden.
But when the share of the elderly in Sweden is compared to the share of the elderly in South Africa, only a tiny amount of excess death is predicted for South Africa. Sweden saw 1,140 excess deaths per million, but has 3.6 times the share of elderly as South Africa has — South Africa has a “young” population.
The crude prediction for excess death per million in South Africa, using Sweden as the benchmark nation, is just 314 excess deaths per million, but South Africa saw 15 times that much excess death:
In order to find out what could possibly cause a young population to excessively die at rates more than triple that of a much older population, I graphed the average daily vaccine uptake in South Africa on top of the weekly COVID deaths there:
The higher the rate of COVID jabs in April, May, June and July of 2021 — the more COVID deaths you had. If the rate of COVID jabs had gone even higher, would the rate of COVID deaths have continued to track higher?
Jabbing 3,500 people daily for every million persons is not even a 1% daily jab rate (that would take 10,000 daily jabs per million). But the close tracking of death with jabs indicates that something was going wrong.
South Africa is in the southern hemisphere, so their season is shifted by 6 months from that of the northern hemisphere. The peak death is occurring in “their” winter months. The question of why South African officials administered the most vaccine in the dead of winter may never be answered.
A better strategy — assuming that public health was the true goal — would have been to get the first dose into people well before winter sets in, so that they can get the second dose prior to the elevation in disease spread.
Taking a vaccine in the dead of winter is like waiting until you’ve jumped out of the airplane before putting your parachute on. Only people who love risking lives engage in THAT sort of behavior.
Reference
[when exposure level is similar, then 90% of mortality variation is explained by age] — Levin AT, Hanage WP, Owusu-Boaitey N, Cochran KB, Walsh SP, Meyerowitz-Katz G. Assessing the age specificity of infection fatality rates for COVID-19: systematic review, meta-analysis, and public policy implications. Eur J Epidemiol. 2020 Dec;35(12):1123-1138. doi: 10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1. Epub 2020 Dec 8. PMID: 33289900; PMCID: PMC7721859. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7721859/
[a 65 year-old is 167 times more likely to die than a 25 year-old] — Pezzullo AM, Axfors C, Contopoulos-Ioannidis DG, Apostolatos A, Ioannidis JPA. Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population. Environ Res. 2022 Oct 28;216(Pt 3):114655. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2022.114655. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36341800; PMCID: PMC9613797. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613797/