considers fully vaccinated, according to the agency’s statistics. Twelve percent of Americans 65 and over have not received either two shots of a Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine or one Johnson & Johnson shot, which the C.D.C. Record numbers of Americans with the highly contagious variant have filled up hospitals in recent weeks and the average death toll is still around 2,500 a day.Ĭhief among the reasons is the country’s faltering effort to vaccinate its most vulnerable people at the levels achieved by more successful European countries. Deaths in Britain, for example, are one-fifth of last winter’s peak, and hospital admissions are roughly half as high.īut not so in the United States. In Western Europe, those factors have resulted in much more manageable waves. Together, vaccines and the less lethal nature of Omicron infections have significantly reduced the share of people with Covid who are being hospitalized and dying during this wave. The Omicron variant also causes less serious illness than Delta, even though it has led to staggering case numbers. “There’s been more loss than anyone wanted or anticipated.”Īs deadly as the Omicron wave has been, the situation in the United States is far better than it would have been without vaccines. stands out as having a relatively high fatality rate,” said Joseph Dieleman, an associate professor at the University of Washington who has compared Covid outcomes globally. The only large European countries to exceed America’s Covid death rates this winter have been Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Greece and the Czech Republic, poorer nations where the best Covid treatments are relatively scarce. Americans are now dying from Covid at nearly double the daily rate of Britons and four times the rate of Germans. swelled to much higher rates than in Western Europe, leaving some states struggling to provide care. In recent months, the United States passed Britain and Belgium to have, among rich nations, the largest share of its population to have died from Covid over the entire pandemic.įor all the encouragement that American health leaders drew from other countries’ success in withstanding the Omicron surge, the outcomes in the U.S. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures. The resulting American death toll has set the country apart - and by wider margins than has been broadly recognized. Sweden data for booster doses is available only from Jan. vaccinations) Note: Vaccination and booster data in some countries are available infrequently. Sources: Our World in Data (world vaccinations) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S. The United States has fallen even further behind in administering booster shots, leaving large numbers of vulnerable people with fading protection as Omicron sweeps across the country. Crucially, vaccination rates in older people also lag behind certain European nations. Despite having one of the world’s most powerful arsenals of vaccines, the country has failed to vaccinate as many people as other large, wealthy nations. Some of the reasons for America’s difficulties are well known. “Death rates are so high in the States - eye-wateringly high,” said Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who has supported loosening coronavirus rules in parts of Britain. And it has laid bare weaknesses in the country’s response, scientists said. With American lawmakers desperate to turn the page on the pandemic, as some European leaders have already begun to, the number of dead has clouded a sense of optimism, even as Omicron cases recede. Deaths have now surpassed the worst days of the autumn surge of the Delta variant, and are more than two-thirds as high as the record tolls of last winter, when vaccines were largely unavailable. The ballooning death toll has defied the hopes of many Americans that the less severe Omicron variant would spare the United States the pain of past waves. population) Note: Countries shown are those with the highest gross national income per capita among countries with a population of more than 10 million people. deaths) The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University (world deaths) World Bank (world populations) United States Census Bureau (U.S. Sources: New York Times database of reports from state and local health agencies (U.S.
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