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SvennoJ on 25 July 2021
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I overlayed my world graph to compare 2020 with 2021

The solid lines are 2021, dotted lines are 2020.

Cases are much higher this year due to two main factors
- Impatience, people had enough of lockdowns and/or feel its safe to go back to normal now we have vaccines
- Far more contagious strains have evolved thanks to not properly stopping the spread when we had the chance

Most of the world is not fully vaccinated yet, those 4 billion doses is at most 2 billion fully vaccinated, which is at most 25% of the world population
Actually it's only 13.7% fully vaccinated and 27% with a first dose, heavily skewed to NA and Europe.

You can see in the graph that it is working in the USA with 50% fully vaccinated, lower death rates than last year and even with everything back to normal, cases are just about to start catching up with last year.

Europe went wild with re-opening though, too soon before vaccinations reached enough people and cases skyrocketed. Still the rise in deaths is far lower than it would have been without vaccinations. Europe has about 8x the reported cases as last year this time, and 'only' 2.6x the reported deaths. It is working, but people are simply too impatient and exponential growth will always win in the end.

For the world, nearly twice the amount of cases as last year this time (1.94x) vs 1.32x the amount of deaths as last year this time. With a global vaccination rate of 27/14%, that feels about 'right', actually a bit better than expected. (More cautious, earlier detection)