The Graphic Truth: Two different pandemics — EU vs US

The United States and the European Union have comparable population sizes, but the trajectories of their COVID outbreaks have diverged. The US death rate per million people is steadily rising as a result of the more contagious delta variant and vaccine skepticism, while the bloc's deaths have remained mostly flat — a massive change from this past spring, when the EU's death rate was outpacing America's. One big reason is that the EU has overtaken the US in vaccinations per capita, with 70 percent of European adults now fully vaccinated. Here's a look at the seven-day rolling average of new COVID deaths per million in the US and EU since the start of the pandemic, and COVID vaccination rates in 2021.