With the true total probably much higher, vaccinations still have a long way to go
With ALL its lethality, the covid-19 pandemic – which claimed the lives of more than 2 million people – exhibits some fascinating mathematical properties. Take, for example, the virus’s “duplication rate” – how many days it takes for the number of cases to double. It took 12 days for the world to go from 1 million to 2 million cases in April and another 24 days to reach 4 million cases in May. In early July, after much of the world increased its testing capacity, global cases doubled from 12.5 million to 25 million in 50 days. About 70 days later, the count doubled again to 50m. On January 26, exactly 80 days after that, the world reached 100 million cases of covid-19. Following current trends, cases will double again in 105 days.
These official figures underestimate the true extent of the pandemic. First, many cases were lost during the first wave when testing capacity was limited and so it looked more deadly than it is (as demonstrated by the peak lethality rate seen in the spring, seen in the graph on the right side in the panel above ). Second, coronavirus statistics are notoriously incomplete outside the wealthy world. Tanzania, for example, has not registered any new cases of the virus since May 8 – simply because tests in the country have stopped. In December, the total number of cases in Turkey increased from 900,000 to 1.7 million overnight, after authorities expanded the definition of covid-19 to include not only hospitalized patients, but all those who tested positive for the disease. . In September, when cases totaled 32 million worldwide, The Economist estimated – using the prevalence of covid-19 antibodies in research – that the true total was perhaps 20 times that number.
Whatever the true number of infections, the data indicate that the number of new cases has recently reached new highs: in the last seven days, 4.1 million have been recorded. Although the distribution of vaccines offers hope that the latest wave of infections will eventually subside, there is still a way to go. According to data collected by Our World In Data, an online publication based at the University of Oxford, an impressive 23.4 million vaccinations were administered in the seven days ending January 25, taking the total number of people who received at least one dose for 62m. But the majority of recipients live in North America, Western Europe and wealthy countries in the Middle East. Only 3.1 million doses were dispensed in Latin America, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, countries that together house 3.2 billion people. As our leader in the current issue explains, if the pandemic is a race between infections and injections, then infections are still ahead.