How Canada's pandemic experience has been easier than some

Although difficult months remain ahead especially for poorer countrieslacking the resources to buy vaccines the end of the coronavirus pandemic in the developed worldis now in sight.

Virus variants remain an unpredictableelementbut trendlines suggest that the great majority of deaths anticipatedin developed countries due tothe COVID-19 pandemic have occurred already.

The range of impacts on different countries can be seen in the statistics as the first full year of the pandemic draws to a close.

These statistics show how Canada has fared compared to the five other Western members of the G7: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy. The numbers do not explain why one country did better than another whether it was the policies of the national government, the actions of local governments, the foresight of its health authorities or the nature of its society and the behaviour of its people.

When historians look back on this pandemic, the first yardstick they'll apply to measure its severity is, of course, the number of people it killed.

How bad did it get?

The United States is now coming down from its third wave of COVID infections. Canada has only had two so far. The peak came at different times in different places but each of the sixcountries in this comparisonexperienced one week that was worse than any other.

In France and Italy, the pandemicpeaked in November 2020, but in North America and the U.K. the first two weeks of 2021 were the worst.

On January 8, Canada reported a single-day record of9,214 newcases. The following day, the U.S. reported a single-day record of 315,106 new cases.

The peak of intensity is measured here by the highest recorded daily caseload, per capita.At the pandemic's height in the U.K., U.S. and France, COVID-19 was infecting almost one person in a thousand every day. In Canada, that number never reached one in 4,000.

Canada had the least intense pandemic of the six.

Immunizations vsinfections

Vaccinations are the magic bullet that will end this pandemic. Some countries have done far better than others in administering them.

The U.K.'s vaccination effort started strong and stayed that way. Germany and the U.S. showed steady increases week over week. France was slow to start but soon caught up. Italy and Canada faltered and lost ground.

But vaccinations don't tell the whole story. Vaccines entered the picture as much of the western world was racing to get ahead of a new wave of infections.

Canada placed last among this group of nations in terms of doses per capita. But it also has posted the lowest per capita caseloadsthrough2021.

The U.K.was the undisputed winner of the vaccine racebut posted the worst per capita caseloads and death rates of the six. And the nation with the second-best record on vaccinations the U.S. had the second-worst caseloads.

If this analysis had included the one non-Western member of the G7, Japan, that inversion would be even more extreme. Japan has only one-eighth the death rate of Canada, but Canada has vaccinated about 300 times as many people as Japanon a per capita basis.

Given this strange inversion, howshould we measure each nation's overall performance?

The next graph attempts to do that by dividing each nation's total numberof vaccines administered, week over week, by the number of new cases it recorded in the same week, to give an overall score call it the "OFactor" that may offera clearer picture of how much progress each countryhas made so far in 2021.

The O Factorpenalizes countries for failing to control infections in the present, but gives credit for the future caseload reductions they can expect to achieve by getting needles in arms now.

The damage to economies

Historians will one day study the pandemic's social and economic effects. Some of those effectsaren't clear yet.

By killinga vast numberofEuropean peasants, theBlack Death transformed the labour market,allowing workers to demand more for their work and ultimately helping to free them from feudalism. Perhaps this (far less apocalyptic) pandemic will free workers from the bondage of commuting and cubicles.

Whatever changes it leaves in its wake, it's clear the economic blow of the pandemic has not fallen evenly on all nations.

The six countries we're comparing here have taken different approaches to pandemic-relatedshutdowns and layoffs. Some (such as Canada)went big on public spending, while others held back. And some countries will struggle more than others with the debts they have accumulated.

Some countries' measures, such as Canada's, were directed more towarditems that appear in the budget (tax forgivenessor direct expenditures such as the Canada emergency response benefit)while others such as Italy kept most of their interventions off their budget bottom line (through measures such as loans to industry, or the purchase of an equity share in Alitalia).

All sixof thenations measured here saw nearly unprecedented spikes in the number ofunemployment claims as the pandemic took hold.

But some were hit harder than othersand some bounced back faster than others.

The graphs shownhere only offer snapshots of a pandemic that isn't over yet. Although immunization appears to offer a path out of this global disaster, new mutations and new variants have the potential to delay that.

Unless Canada can improve its vaccination performance, other countries probablywill be quicker to bend their rates of death and hospitalizations downward,closing a gap that currently favours Canada.

But the numberssuggestthat one thing won'tchange: when compared with its peers in Europe and North America, Canada's pandemic experience has beenless intense and less deadly.