suspicion in the ignition_ wrote:
Both countries had significant decreases in deaths. If you look at last winter vs this winter, Switzerland went down by a factor of 4-5 times, and the U.S. went down by a factor of about 3 times. Small difference, and Delta deaths bled into Omicron in the U.S., while they were separated in Switzerland. It's a disease affecting people with metabolic disorders. Occam's Razor would indicate it's due to overweight people.
Like I said before, vaccinating the vulnerable is a great idea to add some insurance. If anything, your and Harambe's arguments put forth that we should be stricter on vaccinating these populations and not worry about the rest.
For the period up to 3/1/21 the U.S. covid death rate was 134% that of Switzerland. One might postulate that the 34% difference is down to population comorbidities. From 3/1/21 to present the U.S. covid death rate is 264% that of Switzerland. There is no plausible argument that the population's commodities explains that change.
The topic of the thread is this divergence between the U.S. and other high income countries which becomes apparent in this latter period.
Prioritizing vaccinating the most vulnerable would be the optimum public health strategy if there were a limited vaccine availability. Not coincidentally this is precisely the way the vaccine rollout occurred. In the U.S. vaccine availability has not been an issue for many months so there's pretty broad latitude in where one draws the line of "vulnerability".
