Covid-19: By the numbers, we are world leaders

Would you rather live somewhere where your chances of catching Covid are high but your chances of dying from it are low, or the other way around?

White House chief medical adviser on Covid-19 Dr Anthony Fauci listens to US President Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

Would you rather live somewhere where your chances of catching Covid are high but your chances of dying from it are low, or the other way around?

Obviously a low chance on both fronts would be preferable to that binary choice. Here in Australia, the latest data on Covid cases and deaths paints a mixed picture of how we’ve fared during the ­pandemic.

On deaths, we remain world leading – the third lowest number of deaths per head of population of all 38 OECD nations. Only Japan and New Zealand have had fewer deaths per capita than Australia. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are the laggards when it comes to deaths, in that order, registering 4.8, 3.8 and 3.7 deaths per 1000 people respectively. Australia has a rate of 0.4.

The picture isn’t quite so rosy when it comes to catching Covid. More than 30 per cent of Australians have now caught the illness, putting us in the middle of the OECD pack – 17th to be precise. Surprisingly, we now have a higher rate of infection per capita than countries such as the US and Sweden, where the virus earlier ripped through the populations, and Italy, where it first came to international prominence in the Western world.

Iceland, which had the equal third lowest death rate alongside Australia, had the highest per capita number of Covid cases at more than 55 per cent of its population.

Like Australia, the reason for the disparity lies in the timing of when citizens caught it – after vaccinations were widely taken up.

Obviously the fact that Australia kept infections so low for so long helped us minimise the per capita number of deaths – Australians have been catching the illness at a rapid rate since being fully vaccinated. And because we have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, that helps too. Scott Morrison may have said it wasn’t a race to get vaccinated when it was. Nonetheless, once we entered the race, our take-up rates have put us in a good position to survive Covid.

That might be cold comfort for anyone immunocompromised or suffering from long Covid, but keeping death rates low is certainly the gold medal yardstick.

It is a separate data set to the OECD numbers being used here, but Australia now has the fourth highest number of Covid cases across the world in the past month, suggesting it’s a very good thing that vaccinations rates are high as winter now sets in.

Mr Morrison was rightly criticised for pandemic failures: with the rollout, hotel quarantine and the delivery and availability of rapid antigen tests. But on the core benchmark of preventing deaths, he can be proud of the job done, along with state and territory leaders. The decision to close international borders undoubtedly saved lives. International comparisons support such a conclusion.