Visualizing 2022 Covid Vaccine Campaigns
aka Vaccine Enthusiasm in 5 countries. Reflective intro and puzzle added April 4, 2023 (in italics)
April 4, 2023: This is the first occasion where I have identified an error in data presentation with my covid work. The error does not change the overall trends, however it is numerically impossible. I leave it to the reader to puzzle out what the error is.
It is fun to play with data visualization. Stories look very different, depending on how the data is presented. For example, here are a couple of ways to look at covid vaccinations in 5 selected countries: Canada, the United States, Denmark, Switzerland, and Israel:
What we see is that these countries are all around 200 doses per one hundred people, or that, on average, each member of these countries has received 2 vaccines. We of course know that some people have gotten 3 vaccines and some have gotten zero, so we don’t have the full story. However, everything looks great regarding vaccine uptake.
However, if we look at this data in terms of how many people per hundred got a vaccine in any given month, it looks quite different:
We then see that in 2022, these five countries are all moving towards a monthly covid vaccination rate of about 3 covid vaccinations per 100 people. That is not daily, but over an entire month.
In the case of Israel, it is more like 1 covid vaccination per 500 people for the past three months.
It will be interesting how much longer this type of data remains available, as it is not exactly flattering to either the vaccine manufacturers or the public health officials who continue to fan the flames of booster enthusiasm…
Evolutionary pressure on the virus has vanished with the lack of vaccine uptake - its plain as day - where did all the new variants go?