The UK experience echoed in Australia -- vaccines drive COVID-19 mortality down down down.

Key numbers in Australia

• No vaccines deployment allowed 270 lives lost per 10,000 SARS-2 virus infections in 2020.
• Full vaccine deployment in the Omicron wave 2021-22 gave 12 lives lost per 10,000 infections.

The FT in Britain continues to be a top source of pandemic data journalism. The following graph from John Burn-Murdoch has been highly praised on Twitter:

Yes, Covid-19 is still not quite as “benign” as flu, but vaccines and boosters are making marvellous progress in driving death rates from infection down in Britain.

For Australia, it is useful to make similar comparisons of the different stages of the coronavirus epidemic.

First a figure for the state of Victoria, Australia, from Matt Hopcroft, with the Pundit’s calculations overlaid:

It can be seen that the size of the September 2021 Delta wave is dwarfed by the numbers of infections in the subsequent Omicron wave.

But the mortality ratio, deaths/infection, was higher in the Delta wave (by a factor of 59:13).

A similar situation applied in New South Wales. Here are Dan Babs recent calculations on this from Twitter:

The relevant numbers are the green 0.80 percent for the 2021 NSW Delta wave versus the red 0.1 percent for the later NSW Omicron wave shown in the lower right panel.

 Pulling this together we get the following summary table:

From this this we can say that vaccines are currently saving near 260 lives per 10,000 infections in Australia.

That’s still near 500 lives saved every day in early February 2022.