Changes

The number of deaths from COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic was influenced by several factors, including scant knowledge of the new virus, the shortage of medical and infection prevention equipment, the absence of specific medical treatments, etc. As a result, the mortality rate stood at 5% during the initial months but decreased from June 2020 due to improved treatments and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) availability. Given that almost 80% of those who died worldwide were men over 70 and women over 80, the age distribution of the population was another factor to have a considerable bearing on the countrywide outcome. It is in this context that the world map of relative mortality shall be understood, in which there are five Western European countries (the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Sweden) with a high mortality rate per 100,000 inhabitants due to their older age-sex pyramids and despite their solid health services, which were caught unaware during the first few months of the pandemic. At the opposite end of the scale, China (although many authors question the reliability of their data), Asia in general and Africa may be found, yet younger populations shall be borne in mind.

With regard to healthcare workers, it is important to clarify two aspects: firstly, the data compiled by the United Nations for individual countries is for different years between 2010 and 2018; secondly, only doctors and nurses have been counted as healthcare workers, excluding other job categories in the sector, such as clinical assistants, pharmacy workers, etc. The main takeaway that may be extracted from this map is the sharp contrast between north and south. The north includes Europe, North America, Oceania, some of the Latin American countries and the Arab World. Indicators in this area are high both in absolute terms and relative to population size. In addition, nurses account for a large proportion of their total number of registered healthcare workers. This situation is especially true for Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Chile, Lithuania and Belarus (these last two countries possibly as a legacy of the Soviet model). China, India and some Latin American countries have intermediate values for the number of healthcare workers relative to population size. In the south, by contrast, sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest availability of healthcare workers, with the few exceptions to this general rule being Botswana, Zambia, Gabon and Ghana.