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(Economist) December 2021. Excess deaths help us account for all causes of mortality greater than what would've been expected without the pandemic. (Economist) Many of the countries with the lowest rates (near zero or negative)--Australia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Taiwan, and South Korea--did three things well early in the pandemic. They tested a large share of the population quickly, isolated people who tested positive or had been exposed, and made a plan for detecting and dealing with cases that may have come across their borders. <~?~Insert art 009_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> Containing COVID in Vietnam. With a population of 96 million people, Vietnamese officials implemented measures for detecting, isolating, and preventing new cases from emerging throughout the country during the first year of the pandemic. (Exemplars in Global Health) Unfortunately, early success can be hard to maintain. Relatively few people in Vietnam were vaccinated for COVID--partly because of the limited supply of vaccines, and partly because vaccines didn't seem as urgent when the country had done such a good job controlling the virus. So when the much more transmissible variant Delta came along, there were relatively few people in Vietnam who had any immunity, and the country was hit especially hard. Its rate of excess deaths went from just over 500 per million people in July 2021 to nearly 1,500 per million people in December--though even at the higher rate, Vietnam was still doing better than the United States.2 The second thing the data makes clear is that, once the infection got to a large portion of the population, there was essentially no pattern to explain which countries kept down their excess death rates and which did not. The experts at IHME have looked at everything: income