Measuring mortality arising from the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of vaccination

Excerpt

Few, if any, would have predicted that the two countries with the most detailed pandemic preparedness plans based on a World Health Organisation (WHO) assessment, namely, the United States of America and Great Britain, would suffer some of the highest rates of mortality during the 2020–2021 phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many reviews have been published, or are underway, to ascertain what went wrong and what should be done better for the next pandemic. Different countries employed different policies for control and mitigation, with implementation at varying times during the pandemic. Drawing conclusions about how effective lockdown measures were, or what impact did vaccination have on hospital admissions and mortality post infection, is therefore very challenging? The continued evolution of the virus, with different clinical and epidemiological characteristic associated with the emergence of new strains, adds to the challenge. Two recent papers throw some light on some of these issues via epidemiological analyses of mortality and vaccination impact. The first is based on data from the Human Mortality Database for 33 high income countries [1], while the second addresses the impact of vaccination and focuses on one country, the United States of America, based on data from the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) [2]. The conclusions of these two studies are of wide interest and of obvious importance to any country specific ‘lessons learnt’ study. …