Occasionally, we would adjust those figures for population size, which yielded per capita measures that showed the country doing only somewhat worse than most rich nations considered American peers. By this measure, Britain became the poster child for rich-world failure — “Plague Island” it was often called in the British press.
But these statistics, though valuable records of the sheer scale of suffering and tragedy within nations, were also biased in two big ways when it came to international comparisons. First, they depended on how much Covid testing was being done: Countries with better disease surveillance tended to register more official Covid deaths while less aggressive places registered far fewer deaths from it. Second, the death counts were driven in part by the age structure of a country’s population, because Covid was so much deadlier for the old and especially very old than for the young and middle-aged. (In an immunologically naïve population facing the original pandemic strains, the infection fatality rate for nonagenarians was perhaps a thousand times higher than for their grandchildren.)
And so as the pandemic wore on, we grew a bit more sophisticated, at least those of us with an undiminished or even morbid interest in the detailed course of the pandemic. We started to talk more about excess mortality models, which offer comparisons between the number of people dying in a given place over a given time with the number that would have been expected, in that place and time, given previous demographic and mortality trends. This approach adjusts for both of the biases and also captures deaths from pandemic disruptions rather than Covid infection, but it also requires a fair amount of modeling and is therefore sensitive to design choices and demographic assumptions.
The Economist maintains what is perhaps the gold-standard database, and according to its per capita excess mortality tables, the harshest pandemic impacts were not in the United States or in Britain but in Eastern Europe, a region that had what turned out to be a catastrophic mix of aging populations, weak health-care systems and often incapable or indifferent central governments. Of all the large nations of the world, this analysis suggests, Russia fared the worst.
And though the public began to tune out, as vaccination spread across the wealthy world, this phase of mortality analysis gave rise to a number of different claims about the global pandemic. For instance, it allowed you to see much more clearly the brutality of India’s 2021, when between the beginning of April and the middle of June perhaps two million Indians died of Covid, 10 times the official number. It gave a different picture of the U.S. experience, marking the country as only somewhat below average globally. And it raised big questions about Sweden, which had been initially derided as a reckless experiment in do-nothing public health and appeared, in this context, if not vindicated then at least unfairly maligned. (This revisionism was a bit overhyped but it’s still remarkable, given the hand-wringing, how average the country’s pandemic was.)