One million dead, but how many lives might have been saved by vaccines???

Last update: Wednesday 5/18/22 

This blog note calls our readers' attention to a new free online dashboard developed by Brown University's School of Public Health in partnership with Microsoft and others. The dashboard estimates answers to the question: How many lives might have been saved had more people been vaccinated?

The short answer to the question is over 300,000 lives might have been saved.

• "This is how many lives could have been saved with COVID vaccinations in each state", Selena Simmons-Duffin and Kojo Nakajima, NPR, 5/6/22
• "COVID vaccines could have prevented 319K deaths", Tina Reed, Axios, 5/16/22
• "300,000 US COVID deaths could have been averted through vaccination, analysis finds", Arielle Mitropoulos, ABC News, 5/16/22
  

Other partners in the development of the dashboard included Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The team analyzed national and state level data from the CDC and the NY Times from 1/1/21 to 4/30/22.  They announced the dashboard in the following blog note:

• "New Analysis Shows Vaccines Could Have Prevented 318,000 Deaths", Brown School of Public Health and Microsoft AI for Health, 5/13/22 

They provided a technical description of their methodology in the following note:

• "Estimating Vaccine-Preventable COVID-19 Deaths Under Counterfactual Vaccination Scenarios in the United States", Dashboard Team, 

The dashboard is highly interactive; nevertheless, a number of its interactive features can be anticipated by examining the following non-interactive copy that displays the dashboard's four sections:

• Upper left section displays four summary statistics (1) Actual COVID deaths from 2021 (2) Deaths per million population (3) Estimates of preventable deaths from 2021 and (4) Preventable deaths per one million population. This section defaults to national stats when the page is first loaded.
  
  
• Lower left section enables users to specify levels of vaccinations (100%, 90%, 85%) and select the entire nation or a single state, e.g., California. The content of the other three sections of the dashboard will automatically change to display data about the selected region at the selected level of vaccination. 
  
  
• Middle section displays a map or a chart about the nation or the selected state, depending on whether the users clicks the "Map" or the "Chart" button above the upper right side of the dashboard. It defaults to "Map" when the page is first loaded. Note that users can salso elect a state from the U.S. map by clicking on the state.
  
  
• Right section displays the same data as in the upper left section; however when the user selects the entire nation, it displays data for all fifty states. The order of the 50 state table can be sorted by the values of one of the four summary statistics.

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Links to related notes on this blog:  

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