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Coronavirus Mysteries
One of the regular topics of conversation with my Japanese friends over the last few months has been the relative scarcity of COVID-19 in Japan, compared to the West in general and the UK in particular. I've had similar conversations with Haawa in Uganda, where the death rate is precisely zero. Of course this could all change, and there have been recent spikes in Tokyo in particular, but so far they seem tame by UK standards. I thought it might be interesting to list some of the factors that have been suggested, lest I forget in the future.
A culture of mask wearing. Japanese people (like many in east Asia) have long worn masks at the drop of a hat, so were early adopters in the case of COVID.
A culture of not touching. Bowing is much more the thing than handshakes and hugs, so less chance for transmission.
An early and strong emphasis on the importance of good ventilation and good hygiene. Seems very plausible to me, though perhaps not a sufficient explanation. The necessity of not living in crowded conditions would probably fall under this heading.
Body shape. Japanese people tend to be thin, and problems such as high blood pressure (a risk factor for COVID) are less prevalent.
Diet. Could it be something in the food that gives resistance to some but not others?
Genetic differences. Could there be some form of genetic resistance shared by east Asians and Africans but not Europeans? I discussed this with Haawa, but it seems unlikely, given that black people in Britain seem to be more vulnerable to the disease, not less.
Climactic differences. Given the diversity of the regions in which the virus has spread, and also of those in which it has not, this early contender has recently lost favour.
The Japanese have a higher "mindo". This suggestion, which I include for the sake of completeness, was recently thrown out by a Japanese politician, Taro Aso, who has a habit of saying embarrassingly semi-racist things. Mindo (民度) essentially means "class of person."
I think I've probably left a few out, so may add to this list as other things occur to me.
Meanwhile, here's another big mystery: why is the UK's death rate so large? According to official statistics, in this country about 15% of people who test positive for COVID go on to die of it. This is far higher than, say, the USA, which has the most cases and the most deaths but where the death rate figure is more like 3 or 4% (something Trump was boasting about the other day, although of course there are many countries with better rates than that).
Possible reasons:
a) the UK is just really really bad at keeping COVID patients alive. This seems unlikely, when the medical care here is on a par with that of most Western nations.
b) the UK is home to a particularly deadly strain of the virus. Odd that no one has mentioned it, if so.
c) far more people are catching the virus than appear in the figures, and the real death rate is thus artificially depressed. This seems plausible at first glance. Testing in the UK is now at a very respectable level, but it may be that the lack of it in the early days of the pandemic is still skewing the total figures. However, even if you just take deaths vs. new cases for the last seven reported days, you still get a death rate of over 11%.
If you have other suggestions, I'd be very interested to know them.
A culture of mask wearing. Japanese people (like many in east Asia) have long worn masks at the drop of a hat, so were early adopters in the case of COVID.
A culture of not touching. Bowing is much more the thing than handshakes and hugs, so less chance for transmission.
An early and strong emphasis on the importance of good ventilation and good hygiene. Seems very plausible to me, though perhaps not a sufficient explanation. The necessity of not living in crowded conditions would probably fall under this heading.
Body shape. Japanese people tend to be thin, and problems such as high blood pressure (a risk factor for COVID) are less prevalent.
Diet. Could it be something in the food that gives resistance to some but not others?
Genetic differences. Could there be some form of genetic resistance shared by east Asians and Africans but not Europeans? I discussed this with Haawa, but it seems unlikely, given that black people in Britain seem to be more vulnerable to the disease, not less.
Climactic differences. Given the diversity of the regions in which the virus has spread, and also of those in which it has not, this early contender has recently lost favour.
The Japanese have a higher "mindo". This suggestion, which I include for the sake of completeness, was recently thrown out by a Japanese politician, Taro Aso, who has a habit of saying embarrassingly semi-racist things. Mindo (民度) essentially means "class of person."
I think I've probably left a few out, so may add to this list as other things occur to me.
Meanwhile, here's another big mystery: why is the UK's death rate so large? According to official statistics, in this country about 15% of people who test positive for COVID go on to die of it. This is far higher than, say, the USA, which has the most cases and the most deaths but where the death rate figure is more like 3 or 4% (something Trump was boasting about the other day, although of course there are many countries with better rates than that).
Possible reasons:
a) the UK is just really really bad at keeping COVID patients alive. This seems unlikely, when the medical care here is on a par with that of most Western nations.
b) the UK is home to a particularly deadly strain of the virus. Odd that no one has mentioned it, if so.
c) far more people are catching the virus than appear in the figures, and the real death rate is thus artificially depressed. This seems plausible at first glance. Testing in the UK is now at a very respectable level, but it may be that the lack of it in the early days of the pandemic is still skewing the total figures. However, even if you just take deaths vs. new cases for the last seven reported days, you still get a death rate of over 11%.
If you have other suggestions, I'd be very interested to know them.
no subject
Reason a) is a possibility: people in care homes did not necessarily get hospital care, they just died.
c) what's 'a respectable level'? We're only NOW (in a borough with a very high rate of cases and very high rate of susceptible POCs) rolling out testing for essential workers (supermarket staff, cleaners, taxi drivers). The rest of us do not have access to tests. 'respectable' to me would mean 'anyone with symptoms and all contacts that can be found'.
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I also saw something yesterday (pre-print, standard disclaimer) an ecological study that had started with "are fermented foods protective?" and included yogurt as well as kimchi and sauerkraut. And found that places where people eat more head cabbage [sic] and cucumber, fermented or not, seem to have lower death rates; on the same ecological/correlation level, eating lots of broccoli and lettuce may be connected to a higher death rate; and yogurt isn't mentioned again in what's visible outside the paywall, which surprised me a little.
I think at least some of it is culture. As the posters on the local buses now say, "Public health is a public responsibility." That should be an uncontroversial reminder, along with "you need to wash your hands for 20 seconds to get them properly clean" or that getting enough sleep is good for health. But Americans and maybe Britons seem to be allergic to the idea of public responsibility. [I blame the right wing, Reagan and Thatcher and all their ilk.]
no subject
as your friendly neighborhood faptol person, i urge you to be extremely skeptical of the framing of fatness as a risk factor. there are way too many factors to this for me to explain it in a dreamwidth comment, but fatness being listed as a risk factor is nowhere near a "clean" assertion. i mean, in some ways, nothing is a clean assertion; and in this pandemic, all information is still new because the pandemic is new; but even fully accounting for those, the framing of fatness as a risk factor sits inside waters that are far too polluted.
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Apparently, it's what you get for making assumptions about Winter 'flu treatment as applied to Covid.
no subject
The true infection rate in the UK is variously estimated at 2-10 million, but only c.300k positive tests.
The testing situation has now been fixed, at least in terms of capacity if not entirely access and admin, and we have gone from one of the worst rates of under-diagnosis in the developed world to the point where a significant proportion of the positive tests may now be the tiny percentage of false-positives.
The UK (or rather England; this is a devolved issue) also has an issue with the definition of a COVID death; in order to avoid undercounting, the definition is "anyone who has tested positive and subsequently died". Due to uncertainty about the long-term effects of covid there is no category of "person who has recovered from it" as yet. This is currently being reviewed as it is making the statisticians look silly, because many of those testing positive are very old (cf. problem with care homes) and quite likely to die anyway.
(no subject)