Global cases falling. Is it the vaccines or something else?
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What are the latest global COVID‑19 case and death trends reported by the WHO?
This is an ABC podcast. Hello, this is Coronacast, a daily podcast all about the coronavirus. I'm Health Reporter Tegan Taylor.
And I'm physician and journalist Doctor Norman Swann. It's Thursday, the eighteenth of February.
And so around the world we're starting to see cases fall, and they've been falling for a couple of weeks now, which is great news outside of Australia and our a wonderful little bubble here, the pandemic's obviously um causing a lot of havoc overseas. And so the question is, Norman, is this just the tail end of a pandemic curve that we would have expected anyway? Or are we starting to see the vaccine at work now?
The answer is nobody can be very sure. But what I can say is that, and if people want to go back in the health report podcast, I interviewed Chris Murray of the Institute of Health Metrics Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle. And they're they're amongst the best modelers internationally of the pandemic. And I think it was in November he predicted that you would see at the end of January, beginning of February. they predicted that the pandemic would fall off.
Oh, we mentioned this on CoronaCast as well, didn't we? At the beginning of the year. Yeah, I think we did. I think we did,
yes. And the and he was saying that was independent of vaccine. So in other words, h they weren't factoring in the vaccine at that point. Because I think vaccines were really just getting going at that point. And it was hard to know how it was going to evolve and y you know, where you were going to get maximum penetration of vaccines. So it was early days in the vaccination strategy. So they didn't really factor it in. His feeling was, I think, from memory, that um this is partly seasonal. That the maximum effect of winter had been reached, even though there's obviously a lot of cold weather to go, and that he felt that that was the reason. And you would have to assume that vaccination may well start it be starting to have an effect.
And remember, cases around the world vary because usually Usually it's somebody who's symptomatic who's gone to have a test, and that becomes a case of COVID-19. But it's mixed in, there are asymptomatic cases in there as well.
How did early pandemic models predict the recent decline in cases?
So it's the definitions vary from country to country. But nonetheless, you you would expect the vaccine to reduce the number of people coming forward for testing with symptomatic disease. This probably would have happened anyway without vaccination. And it's going to accelerate presumably with it.
Yeah, I mean we've had millions and millions of vaccines rolled out now and the data that we were talking about a few weeks ago out of Israel seemed to indicate that within a few weeks people had a fairly good protection from the virus after vaccination. And so yeah, uh the World Health Organization the night before last um said that sixteen percent decline compared to the previous week in terms of case numbers and also very hearteningly a ten percent decline in the the death rate from the previous week as well.
Yeah, there's a lag obviously to the death rate um or the number of deaths. Um and I think that what we still don't have a fix on is what the COVID pandemic is doing in low income countries. And we just need to remember that within low income countries, this is not just a an ethical and humanitarian issue, this is a selfish issue for us as well. That new Variants can emerge from low-income countries if the pandemic is still running relatively unchecked in those countries. And if that's the case, and you've got the fall is where they're doing most, you're seeing is more they're doing most testing. We don't have full visibility in what's going on in low-income countries. And if the pandemic continues and the effect of vaccines is not kicking in because they're not vaccinated.
then you've still got the virus circulating with all the mutants that are being thrown off and those can spread. And if we want to control this pandemic and stop new variants emerging, we've got to immunize low income countries with a very high degree of probability.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What are the latest global COVID‑19 case and death trends reported by the WHO?
0:00–2:07
2
How did early pandemic models predict the recent decline in cases?
2:07–4:58
3
Is the current drop in cases mainly due to seasonal factors or vaccine rollout?
4:58–7:49
4
Why is vaccinating low‑income countries crucial for preventing new variants?
7:49–10:00
5
How is New South Wales planning to vaccinate 35,000 frontline workers in three weeks?
10:00–10:42