The talk consists of two parts. In the first part we first analyse the Covid-19 pandemic during 2021, with focus on case fatalities, taking age-specific vaccination uptake into account. We then compare this analysis with a counter factual analysis without vaccination, thus giving an estimate of the number of lives the vaccine saved. The second part of the talk is devoted to the use of social contact studies in epidemic modelling. It is shown that the age-specific mean number of contacts between different age groups improves the analysis. But, most of the variation in contacts is actually within age groups, so an extended contact matrix dividing age-groups into high and low social activity is proposed.