Things have been slowly progressing and it looks like Qatar has dodged having a bad third wave. Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, the daily cases (both community and travellers) was under 100. Today it was 101, but still lower than it has been for months. Community cases are around 50-75 a day now. Only 67 people are in hospital, of which 19 are in ICU. The last death was almost two weeks ago.
This success has to be mostly due to the vaccination effort and Government restrictions. The Government recently announced that 80% of the total population has now received two doses, one of the highest rates in the world. Unfortunately they removed some of the granular vaccination data because now they are giving out booster doses to vulnerable people, so it is more challenging to simply take the number of doses administered and divide by the population as some people are now getting a third dose. I fully expect over the coming months that they will roll it out to everyone to get a booster, eight months after you received your second dose. By then the approval should have also come to vaccinate children, at which point Qatar should quickly achieve 90+% vaccination rates.
Sadly the situation in the US provides a stark reminder of what could have happened here if vaccination rates were low and restrictions not in place. The Delta variant of Covid is pretty frightening in terms of how fast it spreads and how deadly it can be. Imagine if it had been the "original" Covid, back when there was no vaccination. The death rate would probably be 5x what it is now, millions more would have perished.
For example, Mississippi. It has a population of 2.9 million, similar to Qatar's 2.6 million. Right now the 7-day average death toll is Mississippi is 45 deaths, PER DAY. That's 315 deaths in one week from Covid! By comparison Qatar has had 604 deaths -- since the start of the pandemic. That's the power of Delta when you have a lot of unvaccinated people. Other states like Tennessee and Idaho are having similar waves and the death toll is rapidly rising. That people would rather eat horse dewormer than get a free vaccine is mind-boggling. Glad vaccinations rates in Qatar are so good.
Overall I think once vaccines are approved for people under 12 Covid will really start to get under control. Because of how contagious Delta is I am not sure Covid will ever be eliminated entirely, but at least it should allow life to get back to normal.
