Gates Package — page 907

die from it. That statistic will be skewed by the fact that older people are more likely to die from COVID than younger people, so countries with especially old populations will almost inevitably look worse. (One country that did particularly well--even though it has the oldest population--is Japan. It had the best compliance with mask mandates of any country, which helps explain some of its success, but other factors were probably also at play.) What you really want in a measure of success is a number that captures the overall impact of the disease. People who die of heart attacks because the hospital is too overwhelmed by COVID patients to treat them ought to be counted just as much as people who die of the disease itself. There's a measure that does exactly that--it's called the rate of excess deaths, and it includes people who die directly of COVID and people who die because the disease had a ripple effect. (It's a rate because it's the number of excess deaths per capita, in order to account for the size of a country's population.) The lower your rate is, the better you're doing. In fact, some countries' rates are actually negative. That's because they had relatively few fatalities from COVID, and there were also fewer traffic accidents and other fatal incidents because people were staying home so much more. Toward the end of 2021, America's rate of excess deaths was more than 2,000 per million people, roughly on par with Iran's. Canada's, by contrast, was in the low 100s, while Russia's was well over 6,000.1 <~?~Insert art 008_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> Worse than it looks. Here we see the total number of COVID-19 deaths compared to the estimated number of excess deaths associated with the pandemic worldwide, through