March 8, 2021: Not the Way Public Health Crises Usually Work -

This chart illustrates a public health mystery:

Take the 25 most populous countries.  

Put them in order by average income. (Yep, there we are at the top.) 

And then show the number of confirmed COVID deaths per million residents. 

Look at all those countries in Asia and Africa that had very few deaths!

Siddhartha Mukherjee has a long article in the New Yorker, diving down into this information, and the New York Times has a summary of the article at the top of today's news roundup, from which I copied the chart.

I'm pulling out only a few highlights, but spoiler first: We don't really know what's going on. There are a number of interesting hypotheses, and it's probably a mixture of them, with the mix varying from country to country. 

• Some places that were less hard-hit have a pretty young population. In Pakistan, for instance, less than 5% of the population is over 65. Young people tend to get milder cases than older people do.
• In some places, elderly people tend to live in multigenerational households, rather than group homes. We know that people in group-care settings have been especially susceptible to outbreaks.
• In some warm-weather countries, people spend most of their time outdoors, or live in very well-ventilated houses. Perhaps folks in those countries were exposed to a much smaller innoculum, and got milder cases of COVID.

There are more possibilities. And yes, sure, it's possible some of these countries are under-reporting COVID deaths, but even if you look at the total number of deaths from all causes. it is nowhere near as high as experts modeled when the pandemic began. So, bottom line: people in some low-income countries did not get hit harder than people in wealthy countries. Hooray! How often does that happen? Not very often!