Too Many People Are Dying Right Now
A few weeks ago, in a back-of-the-envelope calculation during an interview with Eric Topol of Scripps, I suggested that because of widespread vaccination of the most vulnerable elderly, we may have reduced overall mortality risk in the country by 90 percent. Topol thought that was a little high, but agreed that vaccines were delivering great protection against death and hospitalization, and while we would likely see some of each during the Delta wave, “it won’t be like the monster third wave.” More recently, the Dartmouth economist Andrew Levin, who early in the pandemic did major work calculating mortality risk by age, estimated in an interview with my brother that the effect was probably 75 percent — that given the same number of cases, we’d probably see about one quarter as many deaths as we would’ve seen a year ago, without vaccines.
The U.S. numbers are a bit wobbly these days, and there are huge variations state to state, reflecting disparities in vaccination rates, among other things. But at the national level, at least for the moment, the reduction of mortality risk seems to be considerably smaller. In the worst of the winter surge, the country was registering 250,000 new cases per day; at its peak, that surge was killing roughly 3,000 Americans each day (often a bit above, but with a few dips below). Today, we have a bit more than 100,000 new cases each day, though the numbers are still rising as part of the Delta wave. If we had reduced mortality risk by 75 percent, that would mean about 300 daily deaths. If we had reduced it by 90 percent, it would mean 120. Instead, in our seven-day average, we just passed 500.
