Home » COVID-19: and what of Mexico?

Comments

COVID-19: and what of Mexico? — 43 Comments

  1. And since they aren’t testing, we don’t need no stinking tests at no stinking border. But the left will say “The wall won’t stop a virus!” What could conceivably go wrong?

  2. Two possibilities:

    The lower reported rate is the result of a natural immunity that comes from more sunny days, or

    The government is not reporting cases of infection.

  3. Is it possible that the virus/flu events in past years already took their toll on the weak and vulnerable so now those who are left are in better shape to withstand this virus event. Here in the US, thankfully we have a decent health system that has allowed a lot of us older people to be alive where we would not have survived a lot of our maladies a 40 years ago. Another aspect I recently read was that in Italy no matter what the other issues a person had, if they tested positive for the Corona that was cause of death, not the criteria used by Germans and other European countries.

    The answer of course is that – – Time will tell – – and I hope most all of us are still here to be told.

  4. Knowing, even if not valid, is required for panic
    even neo says as bad as ny, but ny right now is about the number of murders per year in the 90s… we didnt shut the city down for that… nor overdoses.. or pedestrian accidents… so as bad as means what? relative to other places then relative to what?

    worldwide we just hit the number of flu deaths this year in the US alone..
    Deaths in the US if used to represent the costs of the bailout law passed are over 800 million each… (actually over 900 million)…

    wars would be cheaper…

  5. If Mexico City experiences something close to what NYC is experiencing right now, it will be an epic tragedy. A huge, densely packed metro that has millions in marginal circumstances with a less than robust medical system is a recipe for disaster. I hope they avoid massive illness and deaths.

    I agree predictions are worthless right now. Be cautious everyone. And, good luck.

  6. I would think the weather plays a part in Mexico. Viruses generally don’t like heat and humidity.

  7. Mexico is interesting in that it may be another experiment to point to later. No testing, no lockdown, and are they really seeing an increase in the normal fatality level? If nothing really changes there, then all the fuss we are making is going to look very foolish, as Art indicates. If they go full on exponential, then their prez is going to be in trouble.

    One other factor is the high level on average of UV in Mexico which breaks down the virus. And Mexico City being up in altitude the UV is even higher there.

  8. It appears that the president of Brazil has made the same fateful choice for his country.

    (I guess that both Mexico and Brazil want to be “more like Sweden”….)

  9. There are other similar locations: India, Africa, Philippines. The use of anti-malaria drugs is common in those places and that has been proposed as an explanation for the low rates of infection. On the other hand, how would we know if the infection rate is low? I think we will need to wait for information.

  10. People might have heard of disease data that Dr. Roy Spencer (he normally analyzes satellite infrared thermometry data) was analyzing a little less than two weeks ago. Blog link here, scroll down 60%.

    If I sort all 234 countries by incidence of malaria, and compute the average incidence of malaria and the average incidence of COVID-19, the results are simply amazing: those countries with malaria have virtually no COVID-19 cases, and those countries with many COVID-19 cases have little to no malaria.

    Here are the averages for the three country groupings:

    Top 40 Malaria countries:
    212.24 malaria per thousand = 0.2 COVID-19 cases per million

    Next 40 Malaria countries:
    7.30 malaria per thousand = 10.1 COVID-19 cases per million

    Remaining 154 (non-)Malaria countries:
    0.00 malaria per thousand = 68.7 COVID-19 cases per million

    I tried plotting the individual country data on a graph but the relationship is so non-linear (almost all of the data lie on the horizontal and vertical axes) that the graph is almost useless.

    This is based upon the total number of COVID-19 cases as of March 17, 2020 as tallied by the WHO.

    There are many comments to the above post, some suggesting that poverty and lack of testing may explain the data. This person below seems to agree that something deeper might be going on.

    Ganesan says:
    March 27, 2020 at 3:18 AM

    I’m from India. Not only is transport infrastructure good enough for internal mobility, but also, the density of population is very high. So, social distancing is inherently extremely weak. Yet, the numbers infected (668 as on 26th March) and mortality due to Covid-19 (17) are very low.

    I think the correlation that Dr Roy points out is too strong to be explained away by other factors.

  11. The disease’s effects are mostly concentrated in the NY metropolitan area, with a few other states pretty bad (Washington, Louisiana, Michigan) but nowhere near as bad as NY (and Washington was hit early and hard, and has since leveled off considerably).

    Roughly 65% of the deaths have been in the commuter belts around New Orleans, New York, Seattle, and Detroit. Proportionate to the resident population, the situation is more dire around New Orleans than around New York. It appears to be fairly non-dynamic in Seattle at this point in time.

  12. My wager would be that temperatures in much of the world are putting a damper on this, and in Mexico as well.

    See the figures for the Arabian peninsula. This ailment was present in significant numbers there in advance of its presence here. Hundreds of identified cases, but hardly any deaths.

  13. Well if you survive malaria you may be protected from the Wuhan virus? With friends or “cures” like that …. 🙁

  14. Art Deco:

    Re temperature – what do you say about New Orleans having so much COVID, relatively speaking? If it’s Mardi Gras overcoming the effect of warm weather, why isn’t Brazil having similar difficulty?

    It might be weather. Or it might be poor reporting/testing in most warm countries.

    Then there’s Russia, of course, which isn’t warm and also claims to have low rates. But are they reporting their actual rates? We don’t know.

  15. Everybody keeps saying how the cases are low in Mexico because the number of people tested is low. Now I might be completely wrong, but to the best of my knowledge you don’t need a test to figure out if the person is dead. Things would have progressed from large number of cases to large number of bodies if you were to take the accepted view.

  16. Art Deco,

    Someone was quoted recently saying that because SARS-CoV-2 is not an influenza virus, there is no reason to think that summer, warmth, or dryness should halt or reduce the spread of covid-19. I don’t recall where I read that or who said it, and almost everything we hear is conjecture at this point.

    Here is the current data from Wikipedia for sunny Spain:
    Cases: 85,199; Deaths: 7,424 ; Recovered: 16,780

  17. Neo: Re temperature – what do you say about New Orleans having so much COVID, relatively speaking?

    There is a chart embedded within this paper that graphs latitude vs number of cases. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3550308

    There is a very strong link based on temperature. That is why Bangladesh has only 5 deaths. As for New Orleans, it is a case of probability. It is in a zone that is second-most probable when it comes to getting an infection. See this map from the same paper
    https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/media/SOM/News/2020/images/Climate-Coronavirus.jpg

  18. did a large number of bat soup eating Chinese-Mexicans return from the old country after celebrating the New Year in Wuhan?

  19. Andy:

    Do you really think that the state of the health care system in Bangladesh is such that everyone who dies of respiratory distress, including of course old people, is being tested for COVID?

    I very very much doubt that they are doing much testing or record-keeping at all.

    In addition, the percentage of Bangladesh’s population over 65 is 5%. See this chart. That would affect their death rate from COVID immensely.

  20. Someone was quoted recently saying that because SARS-CoV-2 is not an influenza virus, there is no reason to think that summer, warmth, or dryness should halt or reduce the spread of covid-19.

    No clue who the someone was. Dr. Fauci offered some hedges, but has said explicitly and emphatically that cool, dry weather is optimal for viruses to thrive.

  21. I very very much doubt that they are doing much testing or record-keeping at all.

    Again, the very affluent and very literate Gulf emirates have hundreds of cases and very few deaths.

  22. Neo: Do you really think that the state of the health care system in Bangladesh is such that everyone who dies of respiratory distress, including of course old people, is being tested for COVID?

    Absolutely not, they would simply die. Now where are the bodies? Where are the videos like this one? https://nypost.com/2020/03/30/disturbing-footage-shows-dead-bodies-loaded-onto-truck-outside-brooklyn-hospital/

    The current population of Bangladesh is 164.2M. If 5% are over 65 that is 8.2M people. That is not a trivial number. By comparison the entire population of NYC is 8.4M. We should be seeing higher death count in Bangladesh than NYC if your assertion about old age being the only factor is correct. Yes, age makes a big difference but there are other factors that are just as significant with weather being one. That Univ of Maryland paper is excellent when it comes to this.

    India supposedly has had 32 deaths. This in a country of 1.3bn. Where are the bodies?

  23. Re temperature – what do you say about New Orleans having so much COVID, relatively speaking?

    That the weather is one vector among several in influencing outcomes? In re New Orleans, my wager would be Yancey Ward’s thesis, that the infections are occurring in the hospitals. Another might be that the critical mass of infected people were immunocompromised homosexuals. Just tossing spitballs here.

  24. Good catch Neo. A few towns in the south have been warmish, but mostly not countrywide.

  25. Andy:

    When you ask “where are the bodies?” you are making many unwarranted assumptions, I think.

    I am not alleging that Bangladesh has a problem right now like Italy. Let’s say it has the more average problem like – say – Maine. There would be only a tiny per capita increase in bodies, hardly noticed.

    You also need to know what happens in Bangladesh when an old person dies. Probably at home, I might add. For example (written prior to COVID, but probably describing things that are still the way it works):

    In Bangladesh, there is a paucity of data on the causes of death at the population level. Although the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) maintains a nationally representative Sample Vital Registration System (SVRS) which records causes of death based on the information collected by a lay reporting system, there are reservations about the accuracy of the causes of death information from this system. Studies have used verbal autopsy (VA) as a means to identify the causes of death among children and adult population. VA is a method of assessing probable causes of death based on an interview with the next of kin or other caregivers who were present at the time of death or who are knowledgeable about the events leading up to death. VA has been used previously in Bangladesh to ascertain causes of death including maternal deaths and childhood deaths.

    For deaths from COVID, the bodies are probably being dealt with by families in the usual manner. It seems it would only be if the death rate takes a tremendous leap that the change would be noticed.

  26. Sweden is also being very light in its policies, no lockdowns (and no malaria or tropical climate, to say the least). And so far the outcomes there are not very different from, say, Norway’s. Here’s a Forbes piece.

  27. Art Deco:

    I was speaking of Bangladesh, in response to a comment. I also am speaking of a lot of the other warm 3rd world countries involved.

    For the Saudis, I assume it’s not just a function of poor testing. It may be that they’ll escape, or it may just be they started late and are catching up. I notice that their first case was only reported on March 1, whereas the US’s first case was on January 20. Big difference in time. The very first coronavirus death in the US was on Feb 29, over a month later (see this). Saudi Arabia is only a month out from its first case at the moment and is reporting 8 deaths in a population one-tenth the size of ours. They are also reporting some panic buying.

  28. In another piece on Sweden, there’s this:

    Demography may also be a relevant factor in the country’s approach. In contrast to the multi-generational homes in Mediterranean countries, more than half of Swedish households are made up of one person, which cuts the risk of the virus spreading within families.

  29. Art Deco:

    I agree that viruses tend to like cooler weather rather than high heat.

    And yet that is certainly not universal. For example, during the 1918 flu (H1N1) pandemic, India was one of the hardest-hit countries in the entire world, and that’s saying something. And it struck in the summer:

    Outside, the deadly flu, which slunk in through a ship of returning soldiers that docked in Bombay (now Mumbai) in June 1918, ravaged India. The disease, according to health inspector JS Turner, came “like a thief in the night, its onset rapid and insidious”. A second wave of the epidemic began in September in southern India and spread along the coastline.

    By early July in 1918, 230 people were dying of the disease every day [in Bombay], up nearly three times from the end of June.

    Six percent of the population of India is estimated to have died, one of the highest rates in the world.

  30. Well doesn’t it make sense that if you have a lot of infected people coming to a region (like Louisiana) and interacting closely it would override the warmer weather whereas if you have relatively few infected coming into an area the warmer weather may suppress it greatly.

  31. It may be that they’ll escape, or it may just be they started late and are catching up.

    No, it was present in the UAE at a time when there had been no community spread in the U.S.

  32. Art Deco:

    I was talking about Saudi Arabia. Each country has a different history, but they are all in the same general climate area.

    Nor am I saying that climate won’t turn out to be a big factor. It might. But we don’t have nearly enough data right now to know, and there are too many confounding variables. It will probably sort itself out more as time goes on.

  33. I live in a county of about 2 million with what is considered a higher than avg hit from the virus.
    We have 25 dead.
    That’s kind of a drop in the bucket.
    They don’t give us hospitalization numbers so we don’t know the load on the healthcare system. They give a count of cases but admit it’s likely to be wildly inaccurate.

    I’m becoming suspicious that they jumped the gun and overreacted.

  34. JimNorCal:

    At 25 dead out of 2 million, your county’s death-per-million number would be 12.5. That’s higher than the US rate at present and in line with many of the countries of Europe (not Italy of course, but some of the others).

    The idea is that we won’t hit peak for a few weeks. Also, the idea is that if we hadn’t put in place all the restrictive rules, our rates would be much higher. I think the jury is definitely out on that.

  35. Mexico was infected with Corona many years ago, around 2012+. This was brought into the USA, which is why people were having pneumonia like symptoms from cold/fever that they thought was some new exotic flu mutation. It wasn’t.

  36. I find the relationship with chronic chloroquine use (in malaria-struck countries) more convincing that any other single factor, though average age and heat/humidity are interesting, too. Crowdedness and mass transit seem like likely factors, as well as large numbers of international visitors. But the chloroquine use correlation is striking. Thank goodness chloroquine trials are continuing despite the irrational debate and TDS.

  37. LA is actually not doing badly. The number of cases has been growing by about 338 per day with no acceleration. The number of deaths has been 5-6 per day with no acceleration. That’s for all of Los Angeles County, which is huge and goes all the way down to Long Beach. Wealthy west-side neighborhoods have been hard hit: Brentwood and WeHo particularly. Brentwood’s numbers should be reflected on UCLA’s dashboard, which currently (as of 11:59 on 3/30) shows:

    3,474 tests
    239 pending results
    2,897 negative results
    338 positive results
    31 hospitalizations

    When I checked yesterday, I think they listed 331 positives and I know they had that same number of 31 hospitalized. They aren’t showing any acceleration, and their positive daily tests peaked last Wednesday at 39.

  38. What percent of deaths are hiv positive or patients taking immunosupressant drugs for ulcerative colitis or rheum arthritis?

  39. Texan99:

    Are you assuming “chronic” use of the drug in those countries, or is there a chart showing it? My understanding (and I don’t have time at present to look it up again and get a link) is that the med is used for the populations of those countries) as needed, for people who already have the illness, and then stopped afterwards. There has been a problem with drug-resistant malaria and several other drugs have been substituted instead, as well.

    Visitors to the countries may take it prophylactically, I believe, but not the regular residents.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>