How Canada's pandemic experience has been easier than some

Although difficult months remain ahead — especially for poorer countries lacking the resources to buy vaccines — the end of the coronavirus pandemic in the developed world is now in sight.

Virus variants remain an unpredictable element but trendlines suggest that the great majority of deaths anticipated in developed countries due to the 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 six countries in this comparison experienced one week that was worse than any other.

In France and Italy, the pandemic peaked 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 of 9,214 new cases. 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 vs infections

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 caseloads through 2021.

The U.K. was the undisputed winner of the vaccine race but 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 Japan on a per capita basis.

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

The next graph attempts to do that by dividing each nation's total number of 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 "O Factor" — that may offer a clearer picture of how much progress each country has made so far in 2021.

The O Factor penalizes 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 effects aren't clear yet.

By killing a vast number of European peasants, the Black 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-related shutdowns 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 toward items that appear in the budget (tax forgiveness or 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 six of the nations measured here saw nearly unprecedented spikes in the number of unemployment claims as the pandemic took hold.

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

The graphs shown here 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 probably will be quicker to bend their rates of death and hospitalizations downward, closing a gap that currently favours Canada.

But the numbers suggest that one thing won't change: when compared with its peers in Europe and North America, Canada's pandemic experience has been less intense — and less deadly.