Scientists mystified as Africa avoids Covid disaster | Hacker News Reader

Scientists mystified as Africa avoids Covid disaster

apnews.com

28 pointshappyopossum18 comments

My guess is that it's the younger average population in Africa combined with general higher resistance to sickness from lower sanitation standards in some areas.

But that's just a guess.

Continent Median Age Europe 42 years North America 35 years Oceania 33 years Asia 31 years South America 31 years Africa 18 years

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-median-age-of-ev...

That's probably is it. A disease deadly for 70+ years old people won't do much in Africa where people usually don't reach that age anyway.

This was said about India up until June this year when they were hit. Of course natural immunity (and survivorship bias) kicked in as expected. Maybe that’s what has been happening to SSA, just not in one massive sweep.

Researchers in the article say it's hard to get reliable data, and that South Africa had been hard hit. I wonder how well the infection rate correlates with the latitude and this average temperature. We see seasonality in USA, Europe, etc as it spikes in winter and is less prevalent in summer. Is this why Egypt only reports 1000 cases/day and Indonesia 400/day? Or is it that public health infrastructure isn't capable of accurate reporting?

'Accurate reporting' is influenced by money. USA bonus to health care facilities that house those who die from the virus. As sales team managers know, the reward system will be gamed to grab the bonus.

Another possibility is that many African cultures are highly gregarious and due to the virtual absence of vaccination they’ve long since reached natural herd immunity.

Interestingly though the African diaspora was relatively hard hit. The two possibilities that spring to mind is that diasporan behavior patterns are significantly different, or that the mixed population somehow otherwise altered the dynamics.

What about Vitamin D deficiency? For example, African Americans in the US live at higher latitudes, and the comparatively lower level of direct sunlight causes them to have lower serum levels of the nutrient. This could also partially explain the disproportionate incidence of metabolic disease amongst AA communities in North America.

Differences in average body fat percentage between the two groups could be a partial explanation, along with age differences.

Jelly roll bellies are a factor in healthy living and disease survival. Western media seems to diligently ignore voluntary lifestyle choices which are linked to excess mortality in the western countries.

Western media has been going on about obesity for decades, and it was one of the earliest and best reported findings as a danger sign for Covid. How is it ignored?

I'm willing to chalk it up to having vastly stronger immune systems because of the average living conditions on the continent. I know game-meat is popular and given that coronavirus came from bats, it's likely there are a bunch of other zoonotic diseases present that we just haven't profiled. The vast majority of people who get sick with a flu-like illness don't have samples taken to a lab in order to determine if it was caused by a novel virus - especially in Africa.

It stands to reason that having antibodies against different kinds of coronaviruses, almost all probably undocumented, would confer protection against COVID-19.

It's very unclear that there's the data to make any reliable conclusion. The coronavirus increased the US death rate by less than 0.3%.

In some places in East Africa, ideas we might marginalize and call "conspiracy theories" in America, like COVID being a fake pandemic, are considered common sense knowledge [0].

Ideas and beliefs aren't supposed to influence the actual health of individuals, but they do. This is why modern science takes great care to control for the healing effects of placebo during clinical trials via blind and double-blind protocols. The opposite phenomenon of nocebo, expectations of falling ill leading to physiologically measurable illness, is rarely discussed. These psycho-physiological effects occur independently of personality traits like intelligence and gullibility.[1]

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[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/covid-skepticism-and-[v...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo

My uneducated guess is resistance to coronaviruses and better health policies due to previous epidemics.

Compare African countries based on which utilize Ivermectin for parasite treatment regularly.

Perhaps it's time to realize that scientists in some fields are not able to use their science for predicting purposes, unlike scientists in other fields. And therefore we should reconsider the use of words like "expert" to differentiate people's qualifications. As an example, I had a postdoc who works with viruses tell me, at the start of the pandemic, that masks don't make any difference. I laughed it off and went to wear a mask before it was recommended to the public. And yet I was right, in a sense, that they do offer some benefit. And he was just wrong. And yet he was an "expert" in this field. But was he or is his science not effective at giving him the powers to predict?

He would likely base that comment on the fact that no pre-2020 RCT studies of masks (over decades) showed any significant protective effect against aerosol-spread respiratory viruses.

Covid epidemic curves globally similarly showed no change as a result of mask mandates.

And a massive outbreak of influenza was not deterred by a fully masked U. Mich campus.

They seem to provide a psychological benefit to some though.

As you tell it, he was certainly wrong that masks don't make any difference, even given what he knew at the time.

It's an area where precision can account for large changes in meaning. For example, it's true that the holes in an N95 mask are much larger than the viruses, but they're not much larger than the airborne droplets that contain the virus. There are ways to truly aerosolize the virus itself, but that's not how this virus is transmitted. He couldn't be sure of the transmission, but he would be wrong to assert that masks couldn't help.

It's possible that he was just dumb, or that he said something slightly different from what you report. Even an expert can be Just Plain Wrong.

Science as a whole always works from incomplete information, and revises itself. That happens even in the hardest sciences, like the way Newton's theory gave way to Einstein's. What's the same is the underlying process of trying to continually improve.

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