COVID-19: (Smaller countries) – 2021/07/01

It’s probably fairly ironic that a year ago I did my first post on the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland), mainly to compare Sweden’s infection and death rates with those of the other countries, as Sweden had chosen for absolute minimum lockdown regulations. With deaths per million in the four countries as follows: Sweden (1,436), Denmark (436), Finland (175) and Norway (145). I think the point was made. Why I find this ironic, was because I decided earlier this week that I am going to remove Sweden from my list of smaller countries, for no other reason than that updates from Sweden are done few and far between and when it is done, invariably there is a huge backlog which needs to be taken into account. So, from this week, I won’t be including Sweden in my reports any longer. If you want to see what I wrote about these four countries a year ago, you can go to the following link:
https://missionissues.wordpress.com/…/covid-19…/

Last week all the smaller countries’ infection rates went down and things looked extremely promising. And then this week five of the countries made an about-turn and started moving upwards again. Spain now has 1,700 more cases per day than last week and both Argentina and Colombia have 2,400 more cases per day than a week ago. Fortunately, for now, the death rates are still moving downwards except for Colombia where there was a slight increase in the death rate.

There was a time when Belgium’s death rate was disproportionally high. This was mainly because Belgium when the pandemic started, registered virtually all deaths of elderly people as COVID-related. Belgium may actually have been closer to the mark than many other countries. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to see that their number of mortalities per day is now standing at 4. Only the Netherlands and Czechia, both with an average of 2 per day, are lower than Denmark.

Five of the countries have already vaccinated more than 50% of their population with three of them (Canada, Chile and Belgium) having vaccinated more than 60% of their population. This gives me the hope that, despite the rise in the number of infections, probably caused by the delta variant, the deaths will not rise in the same way as in the past.