The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over but it’s at the point that researchers can examine the effectiveness of responses around the world.

As of Friday, according to the World Health Organization, COVID-19 had infected 539.9 million people worldwide and killed 6.325 million. Of those, 85.675 million infections and 1.05 million deaths were in the United States.

A study published Friday by Imperial College London, based on data from 185 countries (excluding China), found that COVID-19 vaccines prevented 19.8 million additional deaths. About 12.5 million of those saved lives were in countries where vaccines were developed and deployed first. An additional 600,000 lives would have been saved, researchers said, if the WHO had been able to meet its goal of a 40% global vaccination rate by the end of 2021.

But now, the study said, COVID-19 mortality likely will trend down because two-thirds of the world’s people have received at least one vaccine dose.

Meanwhile, a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA found that the United States would have experienced about 300,000 fewer COVID-19 deaths if it had universal health care access.

The issue was not that people could not get COVID-19 care, but that they earlier could not access treatment for underlying conditions that made them more susceptible to acquiring and succumbing to the coronavirus.

The studies provide a thumbnail of U.S. health care: technical genius to quickly develop and produce lifesaving vaccines, amid an uneven and highly inequitable health care system.

Federal and state policymakers should correct the latter.

— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS