@myoclon1cjerk wrote:Well done, Straya.
Ninety-five per cent of reported cases have been reported this year, 2022. In the past seven days, Australia has ranked number three in cases per million population. We [also] ranked number three for deaths per capita, so much higher than the US, UK, France, Germany.
I was reading an article about that and apparently how we assess a death as a covid death isn't necessarily the same as how a lot of overseas countries assess it.
Over the entire course of covid, Australia has had only 12,274 deaths. I'm not trying to minimise the effect of that. But very few of those deaths have been of anyone under 50.
And yes, we have had more deaths this year than over the previous 2 years, but then again, we had very few cases of covid at all up till late last year. We had more lockdowns than most other countries so it makes logical sense that most cases have come this year as we emerged from lockdown.
Since then, we have had millions of cases. Mainly omicron variants.
To say our per capita death rate is higher over just one week is misleading. We should be looking at the broader picture.
For example, the US has had over a million deaths, which (if you take their population as about 331 million), makes their overall death rate 0.3%
We have had over 12,000 deaths and with a population of about 26 million, our death rate is about 0.04%, which is much lower.
UK-185,245 deaths, pop 68,586,143- death rate 0.2%
France-152,439 deaths, pop 65,273,000-death rate 0.2%
Germany-144,717 deaths, pop 83, 700,000-death rate 0.17%
I am not claiming the population numbers are correct to the last person, but they are close enough to get a ball park idea.
The thing is, our vaccination rate is one of the highest in the world. We have over 96% of over 16's who have received at least 2 doses and 68.5% who have received a 3rd dose. The majority of those dying in hospital now have had 3 or 4 doses. The unvaxxed are still over represented though in the stats.
Remembering that less than 4% remain totally unvaxxed, they make up over 10% of the deaths.
If you add in the unvaxxed with the partially vaxxed, they make up over 28% of the deaths.
But 68% of those who died in the July figures were fully vaxxed. I think what is going on here is a lot of them were probably older people with other underlying conditions. Covid pushed them over the edge.
Our government virtually mandated vaccination and promised a measure of freedom once we reached our goals, which we did.
Most of those other nations mentioned are fully open, as are we now.
I think the boosters need to be tweaked, just as they do with flu vax. They need to be tweaked for omicron because at the moment they are great at stopping delta (which is still out there and which is pretty deadly) but not so great at preventing omicron, especially the new variants.
Until that happens, we can expect it to flood through the population.
