It is clear that in the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic (spring 2020), Jews in Israel were hardly at all affected. The situation was very different with Jews across the Diaspora. Some Jewish communities were affected more severely compared to non-Jews around them: United Kingdom, Belgium (Brussels), Italy (Milan) and Sweden (Stockholm) all come to mind. Others looked a lot like Israel (Australia, Germany, several Scandinavian countries), still others (e.g. France, Spain and Canada) were somewhere in-between. What happened in the second wave remains unknown.
Below, the impact of coronavirus on Jewish communities is illustrated. By ‘impact’ I mean the extent to which Jewish mortality in March-May 2020 was higher than expected. The level of mortality observed in 2016-2019 is treated as a benchmark. The comparison of the observed and expected mortality is at the heart of the excess mortality method
Globally, the Jewish situation with respect to coronavirus might best be summarised as a spectrum. The impact of coronavirus on Jews varies not just by country but by locality inside each country. We know this much.
While in spring 2020 the main question about ‘Jews and coronavirus’ was ‘what actually happened to Jews in this pandemic?’, a year into the pandemic the question became ‘why do we observe patterns of elevated mortality among Jews in some places and not in others?’. An interaction of chance and greater than average tendency of Jews to ‘play with others’ is strongly suspected at the moment (chance +sociability hypothesis).
Use the sidebar on the right to look deeper into the subject.