Covid-19's death rates around the world

	Covid-19
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Covid-19's death rates around the world
August 2020 Since mid-March, a statistical anomality has refused to go away: the percentage of infected people who died in mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan has remained low, whereas in Italy, Spain, France, Britain, Holland, Sweden that percentage is much higher.
When the anomaly was only Italy, the simplest explanation was that Italy has many more people in their 90s than most countries (the median age in Italy is 47.3 compared with 38.3 in the USA); but Japan too has a lot of very old people, and in any case one after the other all western European countries ended up posting numbers similar to Italy's.
Even more puzzling is the fact that Germany has consistently remained in the "east Asian" camp instead of the "European" camp. The average German is much less likely to get infected and die than the average Italian or Brit. Meanwhile a similar divide started showing up in the USA: low death rate in California versus high death rate in New York and bordering states.
Soon, it also became apparent that Southeast Asia was blessed with an even lower death rate. Vietnam had zero deaths for a long time. But soon it also became apparent that Latin America had the same death rate as Western Europe and the East Coast of the USA. As of today, the European countries west of Germany have a death toll higher than 450 per million people, whereas Germany and the countries to the east (with the exception of Sweden) have less than 112. The Americas from the USA to Chile too have at least 450 whereas in east Asia the highest death rate is Japan's 10 with Vietnam and Taiwan even lower than 1. How can a Brit be 1,000 times more likely to die of covid-19 than a Vietnamese?
Here is a map that summarizes the deaths of covid per million people:

(Click on the table to the right to see the actual numbers: deaths per million people).
Here is a map of Europe with the deaths per million people: with the exception of Sweden (that screwed up) and of Romania (that had a lot of emigrants returning from Italy), one can almost draw a straight line that neatly divides Europe in two camps, high death rates in the western side and low death rates in the eastern side:

Within the USA, from New York to Boston the death rate is over 1,000, the highest in the world. Louisiana too and Mississippi is getting there. Arizona, Michigan, Illinois are over 600, just slightly above Italy. Florida and Georgia 500, Texas and Alabama over 400. But California is barely over 300, Washington State even lower, Oregon barely over 100, i.e. lower than Germany's. Someone in New York is 3 times more likely to die of covid than someone in California.
It is difficult to find a rational explanation for the statistical divide: east Asia, Germany, Greece and California versus most of Western Europe and the east coast of the USA; and Southeast Asia versus Latin America.
One explanation is that Germans have some kind of natural defense. Karl Friston of University College London called it "immunological dark matter" because we cannot see it but the data show that it is out there. However, it should be something in common with South Korea and Vietnam, and we just can't find anything that those two populations they have in common, and NOT have in common with Britain and Italy. This explanation works well to explain the low death rates in the region near Yunnan. The low infection and date rates of countries like Thailand (58 deaths), Myanmar, Vietnam (zero deaths), Cambodia and Laos (all located near China's province Yunnan) raised the prospect that the population of Southeast Asia may already be "vaccinated" against covid-19, which would imply that a similar pandemic occurred decades ago or even centuries ago and left them the antibodies. The province of Yunnan, where the covid-carrying bats are supposed to originate, had fewer than 190 cases in total and no deaths. Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance, is one of the scientists who suspects that the people of Yunnan have adapted to the viruses of its bats. But why would the Germans and the Greeks have adapted the same way? Did the bats of Yunnan cause a pandemic in Germany in ancient times? It sounds improbable.
There are several possible explanations for the low death rates in east and southeast Asia. First of all, people routinely wear masks, and this certainly reduced the death rate. Western people were much slower at wearing face masks and this allowed the virus to spread faster and cause more damage to the individuals that it infected. These countries were also more motivated to take the pandemic seriously and better prepared to do so because of the experience dealing with the 2003 SARS and 2009 H1N1 pandemics, A third factor that may have helped east and southeast Asian countries has been suggested by a study by Gonzalo Otazu at the New York Institute of Technology: whether coincidence or not, countries like Japan with mandatory policies to vaccinate against tuberculosis with the bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine register fewer covid-19 deaths than the other countries. See also How did east Asia contain it?
Viruses undergo mutations rapidly. RNA viruses like the flu undergo two mutations per month. The other possibility is that the virus mutated into something deadlier when it moved to Italy. Italy gave this deadly strain to Spain, France and Britain, but not to Germany. It also gave it to New York, but not to California. See One Virus or Two?
Finally, one can look at the way governments responded. Germany and Britain have wildly different death rates, but Germany is run by Angela Merkel, a scientist who understands science and numbers (she spent 12 years at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences), whereas Britain is run by a clown, Boris Johnson, who studied journalism. The governments of China, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam took action early on (and some of them have the advantage of being totalitarian regimes that can impose draconian decisions on the population) whereas Western Europe hesitated in the belief that it would not be affected and the USA never had a national strategy at all.
See also:
Back to FAQ/ Q&A about Covid-19,
Data on Covid-19 and selected sources,
Covid-19: How it may change the World,
The Clown & the Virus,
The Clown & the Virus - Part 2,
Trump's Virus,
Sinophobia & Covid-19,
Sinophobia & Covid-19 in US Media,
Was covid-19 made in the USA? in China? TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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