"The paper speculated that this might be due to cross-reactivity with proteins from the “common cold” coronaviruses”, and raised the possibility that there might be a part of the population that has at least some existing protection against the current pandemic."
...this might explain why different parts of the world (e.g. east Asia, including Australia and New Zealand, vs. western Europe) have vastly different outcomes that don't seem to correlate well to genetics, culture, or policy. If a "common cold" coronavirus hit east Asia in the past, but never made it to western Europe, it could explain the different impact.
New Zealand is different because it eliminated the virus.
By April the infection had been isolated and through May they basically ensured the few people who had it were kept away from everybody else long enough to recover, by June they were finished and getting back to normal. Every new reported infection in New Zealand for the last 70+ days is a person in quarantine or "managed isolation" because they arrived from somewhere it's endemic. Will it leak eventually? Probably, and they're ready for that. [Edited to remove claim that New Zealand is unique when several other countries also eliminated this virus as pointed out by another poster]
They hoped Australia could do the same, and then they'd open the border to Australia, but Australia botched it and now has a high rate of new infections.
New South Wales has elevated case levels. It's not as obviously terrible as Victoria but it's going the wrong direction.
I actually didn't know about Vietnam and Thailand, so thanks for that. But again it seems like elimination was a conscious strategy like in New Zealand. So in my opinion strategy is the difference, not some innate biological quirk shared by people across New Zealand and Vietnam but apparently not in parts of Australia.
NSW has received cases from the Victoria bungle. There's little regard for social distancing or shut down measures. We're screwed now. It's just a matter of time.
If NZ is because it eliminated the virus, then it will all happen again when (inevitably, in a virus this widespread throughout the world) someone brings it back in.
Yes, unlike prior to the pandemic New Zealand is burdened by now requiring border controls to prevent re-infection and a test & trace infrastructure to find anything that slips past and stop community transmission.
All this is of course still much cheaper than the alternative.
The virus spread quite well in Wuhan and the South Korean church though. Why do you dismiss the significant policy differences as a sufficient explanation?
It fails to explain why countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia have so few deaths.
There are 470 million people between those three Asian nations, and fewer deaths than in Canada (which has done a very sound job against the virus).
Indonesia has as many deaths as Sweden, with ~26 times the population. The Philippines has 1,846 deaths vs Brazil which has 82,771. Bangladesh has 2,751 deaths, 30% of what Germany has, despite Bangladesh having nearly twice as many people. The Germans responded in extraordinary fashion to the virus. Bangladesh has so few deaths because their response was vastly superior, better funded, better organized, technologically superior in its testing and tracing? Comeon.
The Philippines had an amazing response to the virus compared to Germany or Canada or Brazil or Switzerland? No way. There's definitely more going on there, including an impact from the different climates. It's entirely reasonable that some parts of Asia could have greater immune protection due to past virus exposures.
> It fails to explain why countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia have so few deaths.
It's obvious if you check the population pyramids (Google "population pyramid $COUNTRY_NAME"). Most of the deaths are in the older population, and the average population age of Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia is much younger than e.g. Canada.
The data reported across certain countries may not be directly comparable due to differences in testing, reporting processes and other discrepancies.
Most of my asian friends believe mask wearing and willingness to self isolate (sick, so stay home/wear mask/try not to spread) are a factor when comparing to western nations.
Vitamin D may also play a part. I recall there were studies indicating that Vitamin D deficiency could be a problem for those who get sick. I have no data here but I suspect westerners are far more likely to be Vitamin D deficient.
I would not be surprised as well if general health across populations has a relationship (diabetes, obesity etc).
Aside from that, regulation and enforcement matter. Australia kept cases under control early on but their recent delay in locking down hard with new cases has meant the spread continues out of control. New Zealand on the other hand had a very strong lockdown and try to enforce quarantine and case management. So far cases are controlled and limited only to those returning from overseas. Community spread was eliminated (to date).
Becausr none of these countriest are telling you corrent mortality number. There are openly fuzzing the numbers and actively suppresing domestic jounalists with laws that protects the government from criticisms. This is atleast true for Bangladesh (where I am from), India, philipines and vietnam. To the best of my knowledge. There is absolutely no reason to believe that something magical is happening in this part of world. People are dying, infection rate extemely high. They are being highly under-reported.
Let's leave Vietnam out of this. They're not hiding their numbers. It's difficult for the rest of the world to admit this, but Vietnam beat the virus because their leadership acted quickly, ruthlessly and over time.
In the early days of the outbreak Vietnam didn't have rigorous contact tracing setup, so if a case turned out positive they simply shut down the entire neighborhood for two weeks. Once the source was mostly international cases, they also shut their borders and made no exceptions, not even for trading partners begging to let a handful of people in. But most importantly, even when case numbers went down into single digits, they kept up total lockdown for an additional two weeks.
This saved them from making the mistake Korea made in removing social distancing restrictions the day before a major 5 day weekend which seeded the country and we've been squashing spot fires here ever since.
Authoritarian regimes that have earned public trust through effective governance are probably the countries best suited to manage a pandemic like this one. It's just there are very few of them so it's hard to think of such countries as a category.
But none of that would matter, given that there are millions of people on the planet who have it, and they will continually get reinfected. Whereas, a previous cold virus that gave some significant portion of them immunity, would matter.
Also, South Korea's death numbers (and Vietnam's) both look pretty good compared to any nation in western Europe.
> Indonesia has as many deaths as Sweden, with ~26 times the population.
Indonesia's deaths are still rising (about to pass 100/day), while Sweden's have tapered off (has been below 20/day for a month and is still dropping).
> Bangladesh has 2,751 deaths, 30% of what Germany has, despite Bangladesh having nearly twice as many people.
Similar here: Bangladesh's deaths are stable (not really increasing or decreasing) at around 40/day, while Germany has tapered off to like 5/day for a month (and recently had days with 0 deaths).
Philippines vs Brazil seems to have a pattern that supports what you're working from, though - deaths in the Philippines haven't really spiked (aside from two recent days, not yet enough to know if it's an outlier or not).
"Bangladesh has so few deaths because their response was vastly superior, better funded, better organized, technologically superior in its testing and tracing? Comeon."
Take into account that beating this virus through contact tracing and isolation doesn't require having the fanciest tech. The actual steps are really simple.
Germany is wealthy enough that it doesn't have an infectious disease response "machine" on standby at every level, Bangladesh is not. Bangladeshi public health teams deal with outbreaks of deadly infectious disease all the time, that's not true in any wealthy country.
I don't doubt that if you gave each country five years, Germany would come up with a better funded, equipped (and maybe even trained) public health system but this was a situation where days mattered.
It would be quite a coincidence if Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam all just had different reasons for having lower death totals (by a LOT) per capita than all the nations of western Europe. An explanation that didn't require a different explanation for every nation in east Asia is a lot more convincing, I think.
Actual scientists i follow on Twitter are consistent in saying there is no sign of strains with different virulence. I believe this is a myth. I would be interested to see any actual research showing otherwise, if you can find it (not NYT articles!).
There's a more infectious mutation that overtakes the original form wherever it spreads, including Asia, although it's not more severe. I guess Asian countries would have an advantage because they faced the original form first and got their act together, while Europe and the East Coast of the US faced the more infectious variant early on. (The West Coast, on the other hand, started out with the original form, probably because the virus came directly from Asia. The variant didn't even show up in the Bay Area until May, for example.)
> The D614G mutation displays only three independent emergences that qualify for inclusion in our analyses. While this limits our power to detect a statistically significant association with transmissibility, the low number of recurrent mutations leading to the D614G allele suggests that, rather than being a driver a of transmission itself, it arose early and went up in frequency by hitchhiking with one of the deepest branches in the global phylogeny as the SARS-CoV-2 population expanded.
People are still working on this, and it should become clearer in time.
Do you really find it easier to explain the different impact with genetic differences rather than simply different government policies and cultures? What about it doesn't correlate again?
I think it's hygiene related. I hypothesize that people living in countries with low hygiene have more exposure to diseases and thus better immunity. Examine India:
In India, People throw trash everywhere, defecate everywhere, piss everywhere, wipe their rear ends with their hands, eat with their hands, and also shake other peoples' hands with the same hands... In general, it's well known that India is a pretty low hygienic country. Which may explain this:
Basically low hygiene exposes people to more diseases allowing their bodies to develop greater immunity inline with the quotation you mentioned above.
There may be a correlation. I just gave some anecdotal data... Maybe some data scientist can find the correlation between two quantitative datasets: quantitative hygiene levels by country and deaths/infections of covid-19 by country.
Data in India has a long way to travel from village to town to district to state to the national level. At each stage all kind of errors intentional and unintentional enter the system. All these errors keep accumulating as they move up the food chain. By the time it reaches the top (and it takes its sweet time) god knows what it actually means.
Just to make things more interesting there is major fudging at the end of the chain to make it fit what was produced by the system over the previous years, cause budgets and all kinds of plans and policies that are based on prior garbage will start imploding otherwise.
The interesting thing Covid has done is expose how bad those numbers are because the regional govts for the first time are dutifully releasing Daily Data from the morgues. That data leaks out non-covid deaths, which should more or less match non-covid deaths/mortality rate data reported from prior years. And it doesn't. By large factors.
(Google non covid mortality rate for whatever city and compare with historic numbers in the national data portal)
Your hypothesis assumes they are all not dying from low hygiene. They probably are, in large numbers, and are just not being counted.
I haven't even presented data, I just presented a hypothesis using a BBC article about India as an anecdotal example.
The article is literally from the BBC. You are literally saying the BBC is completely wrong about India. If that's the case then really the onus of proof is on you. Why should I trust the arbitrary words of some guy on the internet over the BBC? I mean I don't even completely trust the BBC but I trust you even less.
All the stuff you wrote could be pulled out of your ass. Just reference your sources about inaccurate covid data from India if you want me to believe you, which I will if you provide at the very least a source that has equal weight to my own source... Like I'll even take Fox news as evidence enough to dispute the veracity of BBC.
>Your hypothesis assumes they are all not dying from low hygiene. They probably are, in large numbers, and are just not being counted.
I mean isn't what you just said just another hypothesis? Worth considering. The same quantitative analysis done on my suggestion will say something about your hypothesis as well. Either way worth looking into.
I mean, we're just talking about India here, my hypothesis extends past India. I can use other anecdotal data for comparison...
The country with the lowest hygiene index is Ethiopia. Total corona virus deaths: 167. That's a small, small amount. You say shitty data as well? I say, it could be, but low hygiene needs to be investigated as this is what the OP's comment is suggesting.
So Obviously, it it Evidence? No. Worth looking into? Yes.
> low hygiene exposes people to more diseases allowing their bodies to develop greater immunity
Interesting theory, and I asked an epidemiologists that very question ("is it better to expose yourself to everything or to be hygienic?"). Her answer: it's complicated.
...this might explain why different parts of the world (e.g. east Asia, including Australia and New Zealand, vs. western Europe) have vastly different outcomes that don't seem to correlate well to genetics, culture, or policy. If a "common cold" coronavirus hit east Asia in the past, but never made it to western Europe, it could explain the different impact.