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Comment by yters | Hacker News Reader

If you graph covid-19 death rate by latitude, all the warmer latitudes (tropics and southern hemisphere) have significantly lower death rate.

I'd say vitamin D is a proxy for sunnier latitudes.

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I have been particularly amazed by the reported deaths in Singapore, which has been struggling with multiple outbreaks. To date, only 21 people have died from the virus there, supposedly, despite over 25K infections. That is a remarkable contrast to many other countries. Malaysia, Singapore's only land border neighbor, has nearly the same rate.

Vietnam has zero reported deaths.

They also have only 288 reported cases, which is astonishingly low and hard to believe. But possible -- Taiwan is similar. Though Taiwan does not count as one of the warmer climates like Singapore or Malaysia.

Temperature seems pretty close between Taipei and Kuala Lumpur.

Not in the winter I don’t think. Maybe now.

Trivial counter-example: Iceland.

Very few countries can give you an accurate death rate at this point.

If you look at mortality among demographics that were thoroughly tested, you can tell that the age distribution was definitely higher on the Diamond Princess than on the French aircraft carrier. That's about it.

That's the other interesting point about graphing by latitude: the very cold countries such as Iceland also have remarkably low death rates.

It is the temperate, winter latitudes that have extremely high death rates.

Here's the graph, you can see for yourself. A very clear trend based on latitude.

https://github.com/yters/covid-19-latitude/blob/master/coron...

I'm not sure why this trend isn't discussed more in the popular media. Seems quite significant, and is very easy to reproduce. Just scrape Google's covid-19 stats and join with a geographic coordinate source. A journalist could do this by hand with an Excel spreadsheet in about half an hour.

If this trend holds up, then as the Northern hemisphere hits summer, the death rates should plummet. On the other hand, in the Southern hemisphere as winter approaches the death rates will go up.

> Trivial counter-example: Iceland.

Iceland actually has Vitamin D deficiency levels comparable to a country such as Greece [1][2]. Supplements such as fish oil liver are in widespread use.

[1] https://www.careacross.com/blog/are-you-getting-enough-vitam...

[2] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/103/4/1033/4662891

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