And by excess death numbers, the US probably already had that many deaths before the time Australia locked down. The world acted too late to not let the cat out of the bag. Australia definitely avoided a lot of impact by locking down and starting locked down, but it was happenstance and geography that allowed it to do so semi-effectively

I believe most of the deaths in the US were not actually early. They were in that May-October range were there was just... yeah.

Edit: data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

My old area under the curve skills require a bit more than a mark 1 eyeball. But most of it seems to be later, but there was an April spike.

They have a cumulative deaths option on their Covid data (the link is scaled to population, there's a toggle for that on the graph header).

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

The low China numbers prior to Omicron certainly seem to be a result of successful containment, I guess we will find out more over the next months about how Omicron goes (and whether they report it accurately).

I think living in the relative freedom of the US rather than Australia for the last two years has been worth way more than an 0.27% chance of dying.

We spent most of 2020 and half of 2021 living with no fear of the virus because it wasn't here. No one I know has even been hospitalised by COVID. It is hilarious to me (and most Australians I know) that Americans think we had a hard time or our strategy didn't work. It did. We came as close as possible to "winning" the pandemic. Now if you lived in Melbourne life kinda sucked. But everywhere else was fine. Perth and Adelaide had about ~2 weeks of lockdowns between them after May 2020.

Also a 2 in 1000 risk of death is frankly awful. I wouldn't take those odds.

> So the gap will likely narrow over time.

No. Most of the early deaths occured because people didn't get some vaccine immunity before getting their first infection. Most people in Australia were vaccinated before their first infection thereby lowering the death rate.

I expect the gap to continue to narrow because it has been narrowing: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

If you start from the premise that a much larger portion of the vulnerable in the US have already been infected, the expectation would be that the gap will only ever narrow, so the direction isn't really an indictment of the policy in Australia, you have to look at where things end up.

I didn't say it was an indictment of Australian policy, and don't think that. But my parent was saying that the gap was unlikely to narrow, which is just wrong.

Besides the statistical anomaly at the end (probably a one time correction for some past cases) the US death rate has always been higher. So the gap has been widening until now. Look at cumulative cases.

Only the derivative of the gap, the daily deaths per capita, has been narrowing. I agree that the daily numbers should become similar when prior immunity due to vaccination or infection becomes similar (all else being equal). But that does not erase the huge amount of deaths before people got their first vaccine.

Good point! In cumulative deaths per million:

                  US   AUS  delta
    2022-01-01  2477    87   2360
    2022-02-01  2673   141   2532
    2022-03-01  2852   204   2648
    2022-04-01  2948   247   2701

I didn't look closely at the graph and I misread the recent apparent spike, which I agree with you is likely some kind of correction.

I'm sorry I can't go back and edit my comment!