South Korea's cases and deaths have been increasing for a few months, while Spain and Japan have very recently had very large spikes (Japan's was several times larger than their previous spikes).
> South Korea's cases and deaths have been increasing for a few months,
That's because Korea had relatively slow roll out of vaccination + large national holiday (Chusuk). Given that Delta needs full vaccination to meaningfully slow down the spread, this is expected. The last week's R was less than 0.9, which coincides with recent vaccination program focused on the second shot while the mobility number is steadily increasing! There's a certain threshold where vaccine shows meaningful impacts on a reproduction rate, so you cannot simply saying "# of case is rising, vaccine is useless".
> while Spain and Japan have very recently had very large spikes (Japan's was several times larger than their previous spikes).
Japan also had pretty slow roll out, it had ~40% of full vaccination at the point of the spike but the number rapidly dropped as full vaccination rate goes up rapidly. This actually proves my point of strong correlation between reproduction rate and full vaccination rate. I know Japan now somehow arbitrarily limits free testing but positive test rate also has dropped significantly.
Spain's the most recent spike was mostly due to their lack of lockdown option. It also had some level of vaccine hesitancy (which led to much lower fully vaccinated than partial vaccination rate) but the recent spike led many people to take their second shot. And they're now seeing a significant drop without declaring state of emergency.
All of those slowing downs are strongly correlated with full vaccination rate. Of course, vaccine's effectiveness wanes over time so some sort of booster will be needed to keep its effectiveness.
