Vaccinated Gibraltar Hasn’t Had a Covid Death or an Active Case in Weeks

Gibraltar appears to be well on its way back to normal life, for the country’s coronavirus cases appear to have almost completely dropped to 0 since every adult member of the population has been vaccinated.

For those unfamiliar with their geography, Gibraltar is a British territory on the southern peninsula of Spain where the Mediterranean Sea separates Europe from Africa. The country’s size is comparable to Monaco and the Vatican, and with a population of approximately 35,000, it doesn’t exactly take very much for a pandemic or any other phenomenon to create a significant national trend.

Josef Bouska, a marketing write and resident of Gibraltar, wrote an essay for Slate to reflect on Gibralitar’s response to Covid while the disease spread throughout the rest of Europe. He recalled that the country went into lockdown for the first few months of the pandemic, and while they were able to keep cases under control for most of the year, things got bad in the winter time when Gibraltar saw a massive growth of Covid cases in its tiny population.

“The winter was a crash course in exponential growth,” Bouska wrote. “Gibraltar went from 60 active infections in mid-December to more than 1,200 just three weeks later. Hospitalizations and deaths soon followed. During the whole of 2020, Gibraltar lost only 7 people to Covid-19. The score for January alone was 71.”

Bouska went on to note that with amount of people in Gibraltar who died, there was a period of time when it had the world’s highest proportional Covid death rate. The government was able to launch a massive vaccine rollout eventually, and at this point, the entire country has been inoculated against the disease. In fact, Bouska says Gibralter’s vaccination rate is currently 106.7 percent because they’ve also been vaccinating people from Spain who typically come into the country during the day.

From the essay:

After two months of more or less unrestricted life, one thing is clear: Vaccines do work. There have been no active cases among Gibraltarian residents for three weeks now. The COVID ward of St. Bernard’s Hospital has seen two hospitalizations and zero deaths since March 14. If anyone still needs convincing that vaccination is worth it, they won’t find a better case study than “Gib.” Forget about the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s about leaving the tunnel far behind.