Nearly six months after the first Covid-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use, the Guardian analysis shows that the vast majority of the world has not yet seen a substantial benefit.
Lack of supply, safety concerns, public apathy and slow launches have led to most countries still relying on onerous blockages and other quarantine measures to reduce the severity of their outbreaks.
Clear gaps have opened up between a few countries where vaccination levels are high, those struggling to intensify their programs and the many, mostly poor, countries that have so far received only a handful of vaccine doses.
Mapping changes in death rates from 31 January to vaccination rates in each country provides a snapshot of the state of the world’s vaccination run against the virus. Here’s what he tells us.
data
Vaccination rate data come from Our World in Data and show the total number of vaccinations in a given country per 100 people. Countries that have not yet recorded a vaccination rate have not been included.
Data on deaths come from Johns Hopkins University. The change in deaths from 31 January is calculated by calculating the percentage of deaths between the two-week period until 31 January and the two-week period until 19 April.
Countries that do not yet have a documented vaccination rate are excluded. Countries with an increase of more than 1,000% and less than five deaths in the two weeks to 31 January were excluded, so that the low baselines do not distort the international image.
The strict stricture data comes from the government response tracker Oxford Covid-19. The change is calculated by comparing a country’s average stringency score in February with the April average stringency score. A change of -10 or less was used to identify those countries that have opened up significantly in the last two months.