With a cumulative death toll of over 400,000, the United States exceeds any other country’s overall COVID-19 mortality: near double what Brazil has recorded, and four times the death count in the United Kingdom. Now, the United States has gone all in on vaccines, and it is doing considerably better on distributing them than on handling the pandemic itself. At the current rate, a majority of Americans will be protected in six months. That’s not as efficient as in Israel, where this week even 30-somethings became eligible for their shots, and it’s not even comparable to the U.K., which is projected to reach an immunized majority in half the time of the United States, but it is considerably faster than most of Europe.
Living in the United States right now, scrolling through social media posts of elderly relatives and health care workers brandishing Band-Aids on their shoulders, it’s possible to feel a glimmer of hope—to sense we are, at the very least, nearing the beginning of the end. We at Foreign Policy asked our contributors to tell us how the vaccine rollout felt in other countries. (If you’re looking for numbers, our analytics team has compiled everything you need on COVID-19 responses around the world here.)
