Peaked?

It looks as if we might have peaked and are now back on the way down. Maybe double the height of the last peak and maybe ten months later - so clearly something more complicated than simple seasonality is going on here.

A bright spot looks to be India, where deaths have fallen right away.

But what does the future hold, particularly that we are now in a new, vaccine protected world? Getting a run of past data on one graphic, from the rather different world of flu, proved harder than I expected, but I was able to build the snap following from reference 2.

I have not read the paper and know nothing about the quality of the data presented here, beyond thinking that the middle of the 19th century is a long time ago, a time when one might think that deaths statistics was not the industry it became since. And that the numbers for the 1880's look very improbable. But there is enough there to suggest that the number of deaths varied a good deal over the years, peaking exceptionally in 1918 and 1919. Is this sort of variation what we might expect from the current disease and its descendants in the years to come?

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/still-not-yet-peaked.html. The graphic's last outing, getting on for a month ago. From the FT.

Reference 2: The Age Pattern of Mortality in the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic: An Attempted Explanation Based on Data for England and Wales - Christopher Langford - 2002. Which starts: 'the worldwide influenza outbreak of 1918-19 had a number of features for which it has become notorious. The most obvious was its terrible virulence. Whereas, usually, influenza tends to be fairly benign (an old physicians' joke about the disease was "Quite a godsend! Everybody ill, nobody dying") the 1918-19 variety showed a dreadful propensity to lead on to pneumonic complications and death...'.