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Why have there been low COVID death rates in Africa? — 29 Comments

1. Charles C. Mann’s “1491” and “1493” books point out that African’s strong disease resistance seems to be a large factor as to why slavery became an “African only” thing in the Americas over time as opposed to the more typical “everyone always enslaves everyone” common throughout history. The numbers quoted (IIRC) were that whites and Indians had a mortality rate of 70-90% in 1 year (mostly to malaria and yellow fever), where an African had “only” a 5% mortality rate (largely malaria only with yellow fever being considered a mild children’s disease among their population). I can’t help but wonder if this carries through to coronaviruses in general and SARS-COV-2 in particular, perhaps?

2. Comparatively few old people, comparatively few obese people, installation of climate control unusual, and haphazard reporting. Here’s a hypothesis more speculative: the mad scientists in Wuhan engineered the virus to attack people of European extraction.

3. Art Deco:

   Anthony Fauci knows nothing, nothing!

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34ag4nkSh7Q

4. Not much effort goes to testing. Granny is dead, no surprise so why test?
   The people with co-morbidities are long gone. COVID is just one of many things waiting to kill people. Perhaps the cause of death data was collected by the equivalent of the CDC so the result is determined by politics. Lots of possibilities.

5. HCQ is an OTC anti-malarial. Taken by the millions by troops in Viet Nam.

6. Richard Aubrey:

   But because of extensive use of HCQ in Africa in the past, quite some time ago many countries had a problem with HCQ-resistant malaria and had been using other anti-malaria drugs instead of HCQ to get around the problem. So the extent of HCQ’s use in Africa at the time of the pandemic is not as widespead as people think. I’ve read quite a bit about this in the past. Can’t find a really good article on it at the moment, but here’s something that goes into it.

7. What Art Deco said.

   Our experience is in Liberia. Very poor country. Most of their lives are spent outdoors.

   From the report you linked to:

   “Studies show that coronavirus transmission, while also possible outdoors [94], is concentrated in indoor settings where it is estimated to be about 19 times higher.”

   According to the report, we (US) spend “90% of our time indoors or in a car”.

8. I don’t have the data at hand, but I think that Africans in Europe, as well as black Americans, acquired covid19 infections at a higher rate than did their white compatriots. Also, once infected, I think that the consequences were more serious for blacks than they were for whites. Admittedly, I’m working from memory, and I’m too old to claim complete reliability for that part of my brain.

   Of course, this adds to the puzzle of low death rates in Africa, but it could also help unravel the mystery of covid19 infection patterns and mechanisms. Since race is intimately involved, I expect that Al Sharpton will tell us the truth of the matter. Who knows, Spike Lee might even make a movie about it.

9. Neo.
   Thanks for the article. I did a lot of SubSaharan Africa studies in college and DDT and resistance were important even back in the Sixties.

   If HCQ had, accidentally or not, anti-malarial properties, one might bet that is more than likely in its replacements.

   Speaking of DDT, there is substantial info on the ‘net about the initial work on DDT vs. raptor eggs and such being problematic to faulty to, in once assertion, deliberately faked. Bur Rachel Carson is a heck of a writer.

10. Richard Aubrey:

    And it prevented spots on apples too IIRC. Watch out for big yellow taxis!

11. Richard Aubrey:

    In 2009 I wrote this article on DDT.

12. Cornflour:

    Yes, in developed countries black people had worse COVID outcomes than white people. They have much higher rates of obesity and diabetes, and this is probably one of the biggest reasons. They also live an urban rather than rural life. Also, genetically black Americans are quite different from black Africans – the Americans have a very significant amount of white DNA.

13. Having lived in Africa many years ago, I do not put much stock in their statistics. Or perhaps, the problem is in our statistics. They probably underreport cases and we over report them.

    Covid tests are expensive, so Africans probably don’t take them very often. Also, comorbidities like HIV are rampant in Africa so who knows what actually kills someone? African immunity is probably not much different from anyone else. They are better adapted to the diseases that are prevalent in Africa like Malaria. That’s no surprise. The downside is sickle cell anemia which gives protection against malaria but is otherwise a liability. The American Indians probably thought that Europeans had super immunity because they survived diseases like smallpox better, but that is not a statement about their relative immune systems in general. Like Mike said, “granny is dead, why test?”

    In our country our leftist politicians like to flagellate the rest of us because black people are faring poorly in the epidemic and so naturally, everyone else is to blame. The Afro-Americans are probably not that much different from African Africans. If the out of Africa theory is correct, Africans in general are probably the most genetically diverse population in the world although there have been some obvious mutations since the separation which enables the rest of us to live in far northern latitudes. Also, as someone mentioned, there is some Neanderthal genome to consider.

    I’m not sure whether anyone mentioned that the left made war on Ivermectin while it is freely available in Africa for those who can afford it. Also, in some instances, leftist politicians seem to have forced nursing homes to take in Covid patients. If there is an actual statistical difference in Covid deaths, the gross malfeasance and medical malpractice by the political left in Western Europe and the USA has contributed heavily to the death rate.

14. because black people are faring poorly in the epidemic

    About 14% of the COVID deaths in this country have been of black people, who are about 13% of the population. You’d expect it to be somewhat lower because the share of the black population over 60 is lower than the national mean. OTOH, obesity is more of a problem among blacks. There really isn’t much difference in how blacks are ‘faring’ than how the rest of us are.

15. What Dennis said, particularly about Ivermectin.

    WRT to statistics, I’m not sure I would believe ANY statistics from anywhere, WRT Covid-19.
    Well, maybe from Sweden…
    Simply because a) there are places where data collection (and therefore statistics) are at best shoddy and at worst simply not possible.
    And then b) there are places where while data collection (and statistics) is most certainly not at all shoddy, they are politically motivated…and therefore, shoddiness is “thrust upon them.”
    – – – – – – – – – –
    “If HCQ had, accidentally or not, anti-malarial properties…”
    Richard, I don’t understand this at all.
    HCQ was/is used precisely as an anti-malarial treatment; and thus there should be no question as to why it is also effective (though not by itself, but together with zinc, etc.) against Covid.
    Perhaps you meant to write, “If HCQ had, accidentally or not, anti-Covid properties…”?
    – – – – – – – – –
    That tidbit regarding Neanderthals is fascinating. Might such relative lack of resistance be a reason for their disappearance? (Or has this already been discussed somewhere else…?)

16. Dennis:

    The difference isn’t some fine statistical point that has to do with reporting. If there had been a serious COVID problem in most of Africa, it could not have been hidden. I’ve seen no one who has reported anything of the sort, not even anecdotally.

17. Barry. HCQ had some good press until it figured that an effective therapeutic voided the vax’ EUA. Then it was poison by Trump and a doc could get his license pulled for even talking about it.
    If HCQ has anti-Covid properties, for whatever reason, but is being resisted by HCQ resistant malaria bugs and is thus replaced by other drugs, it’s possible said drugs, too, have the anti-Covid properties. They’d have to be similar in some ways to get the same result wrt malaria. Not necessarily but likely. And so a similar result.
    That, at least, is one possibility for the lower death rate.

18. Richard Aubrey:

    I followed the HCQ story right from the start and followed up later on. In fact, the drug doesn’t seem effective against COVID as far as I can tell.

    The problem, however, was that (probably because of Trump’s lauding it as a possible treatment) its use was demonized as highly dangerous when it was really not dangerous, and when there were no other effective therapeutics available and proper research had not yet been done. I’m not going to go into all the research I ultimately read, but it was a lot and it convinced me that the drug really wasn’t helpful in combating COVID.

    That doesn’t change my disapproval of the viciousness of the campaign against it.

19. Besides many many Africans still taking HCQ or chloroquine –it remains the predominant agent for malarial prophylaxis in Africa– many in endemic areas take IVM to prevent river blindness–and both drugs are easily attainable there if people aren’t taking them regularly.
    (Travelers do typically take other drugs these days as malaria prophylaxis.)

    It is possible other anti malarial drugs could have mechanisms of action similar to HCQ’s, so may function to prevent Covid infection as well.

    HCQ IS effective against Covid, but it has to be taken either prophylactically–it has been shown to reduce infection (Henry Ford study) –or early on in illness–WITH ZINC –to minimize illness.

    The studies you may have seen were from use in people who were sick a week and already hospitalized–it is NOT effective then; or the outpatient one which did not have simultaneous zinc administered.
    HCQ is an effective outpatient drug, and needs to be used as soon as possible. WITH zinc.

    Those are called “designed to fail” studies, and they got LOTS of press.
    Along with ones using overdoses of HCQ and chloroquine, which generated cardiac arrhythmias. No surprise at all. A number were paid for–sit down–by Phizer.

    The move to recommend IVM over HCQ–another VERY EFFECTIVE treatment—came about because instead of just being a zinc ionophore, like HCQ and Quercetin, and facilitating the movement of zinc into cells where it blocks the RNA replicase needed to reproduce the virus, IVM acts at four other sites in the virus’s replication/ triggering of symptoms. Its effectiveness is during a much greater period of the course of the illness.

    When Musk releases what has been censored in the name of “public health” IRT Covid, there may well be blood in the streets. What these people did to push mRNA injections–withholding effective outpatient treatment— resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
    And has caused Covid to continue to circulate, instead of disappearing after three cycles as is typically the case with a virus, as the multiple injected have become virtual carriers–higher viral loads, for longer, with less symptoms. (Why they keep getting infected.)
    God help them when the majority of citizens finally realize that.

    Moving into this RSV, influenza, and Covid season, a reminder–a vitamin D level of 50 or higher is protective against hospitalization, gargling just once a day is very effective in reducing infection (Ghana study) , as is nasal lavage with either 1% hydrogen peroxide or 1% betadyne (which can stain).

    This remains a very useful protocol that has kept thousands of frontline people infection free:
    https://covid19criticalcare.com/treatment-protocols/i-prevent-protect/

20. Lee:

    No, those are not the studies I’m talking about. Those were the earlier studies. Later there were much better studies, and the claims for HCQ simply were not supported.

21. Neo said:

    “The difference isn’t some fine statistical point that has to do with reporting. If there had been a serious COVID problem in most of Africa, it could not have been hidden. I’ve seen no one who has reported anything of the sort, not even anecdotally.”

    Things may have changed since I was in Africa many years ago. However, until I see a reason to change my opinions, I am still very skeptical about statistics coming from Africa. Right now, there is a Muslim jihad in several countries especially in Nigeria against Christians. Hundreds of people are being slaughtered at a time. I can’t imagine that under the circumstances anyone is worrying about a few extra Covid deaths. South Sudan is another hot spot.

    Because of the lefts’ war on therapeutics, it is difficult to know which if any are useful. So far, Ivermectin seems to be the best of the lot. I suspect that hundreds or thousands of people have died who could have been saved if therapeutics had been freely available.

    I don’t blame the pharmaceutical companies for everything. My understanding is that Fauci took his clues from China about how to deal with the epidemic. The war on therapeutics was probably started because Trump was promoting them and the left were determined to make him fail. They were against the vaccines until Biden got into office about the time they came out so that he could take credit for them.

22. Dennis:

    One can never know with absolute certainty, but if there is zero evidence for something I tend to doubt it’s true. There is not only no statistical evidence for high increased die-off from COVID in Africa but there also aren’t even rumors of it or anecdotal evidence. Therefore I see no reason to believe it’s the case, especially when there are a host of reasons why the spread and severity of COVID might have been less in Africa than in the Western world.

    As far as something like Ivermectin goes, when I evaluate something I notice what emerges over time. At the beginning it seemed more promising than it has ultimately appeared to be. That’s not at all unusual. There is no compelling evidence at this point for its use. Just to take a few examples of the overview, see this as well as this.

    I suspect that many people might have been saved by antivirals such as Paxlovid if they had had them earlier, but they didn’t. Also I think that there’s a possibility Vitamin D may be of some help – research results are somewhat varied but not enough controlled studies have been done.

23. Hookworms are more prevalent among people who walk barefoot and use outdoor latrines, conditions prevalent in rural, Sub-Saharan Africa.

    These harmless parasites have benefited humans for most all our existence, as far as we can tell. We can acquire them from our environment, but lose them whenever we break their reproductive cycle.

    Hookworms are in a class of helminths. They’ve been shown to release complex and varied chemicals into the bloodstream to protect themselves from the human immune system. These chemicals also prevent the immune system from attacking the human body itself.

    Everywhere hookworms are prevalent, there are dramatically lower rates of allergies, asthma, lupus, Crohn’s Disease, celiac disease, multiple sclerosis, and other autoimmune disorders.

    The evidence is so clear that individuals in the West are undertaking helminthic therapy for relief, and succeeding where pharmaceuticals and isolation have failed.

    One cause of death from COVID is respiratory failure due to the flooding of the lungs with fluid — an autoimmune response.

    See the link (my name — no interest in the business) for more. It’s an emerging field of research and treatment, currently not approved by FDA, so it’s mostly done by individuals and universities. Also, because organisms cannot be patented, the standard FDA approval process would not likely result in a profit-making treatment.

    Neo, I hope you see this. I think I’ve seen references to your own autoimmune condition in the past. You might benefit from this therapy, as I have.

24. Neo,

    We’ll never settle this. My experience in Africa makes me very skeptical of those claims. If covid19 had the virulence of bubonic plague (30-70% death rate) or smallpox (30% death rate), I would agree with your assessment. As it is, the death rate from the original covid is slightly under 1% (.82%) in a mixed population which is probably similar in age distribution to the population in Africa. That death rate is well above the usual seasonal flu epidemics but well below those of the Spanish Flu epidemic which is estimated to have killed between 2% and 10% of its victims primarily young adults. https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/correction/documents/TDOCInmatesCOVID19.pdf

    If the US government hadn’t politicized the covid epidemic, I would be inclined to accept something from the NIH. Years of lies have destroyed their credibility. I keep reading things from dissident doctors that indicate that Ivermectin is helpful. So, I’m keeping an open mind. I have talked to a nurse practitioner from Odessa, Texas where Ivermectin has always been available. She took care of covid patients during the pandemic using Ivermectin, zinc supplements, and Budesonide aerosol, with excellent results. She did lose several patients including one who was an athletic middle-aged man, so obviously Ivermectin is not a panacea. https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/miraculous-recovery-of-hypoxemic-covid-19-patients-with-ivermectin_4899987.html

    I still support the vaccines for older people who are more likely to die from covid. For them the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks. But, that is probably no longer the case with the newer less virulent variants. Mandated vaccines are an entirely different matter and the government officials who have trampled on individual rights should be jailed. So far, I’ve seen no evidence that children benefit from the vaccine, and the push to get them all jabbed should stop.

25. There have been numerous stories on the Rolling Stone/ivermectin hoax. I link to one to refresh and to detail the journalistic malpractice involved.

    Rolling Stone, which should have learned from the UVa rape hoax not to go blindly after the yummy stories, smeared itself once again and this time with evidence of even less concern for facts.

    I spun through the piece and don’t recall if hey mentioned the picture of the lines outside the ER, ostensibly due to ivermectin. The folks were wearing winter clothing in, at latest, early September. No gurneys, no wheel chairs, no sign of a medical facility anywhere.

    What this tells me is the burning intensity, the enormous urgency to smear ivermectin as a possible therapeutic. They didn’t have time to get their ducks in a row to be even slightly credible. But they jumped on it. Who peddled the screaming need to RS to do themselves another mischief? And why did they sign on?

    One of those things: You see this, there’s no reason, ever, to believe the same people, whoever they are. It’s not the RS story that is the issue. It’s the RS story done so poorly as to exemplify the larger campaign’s frantic lies.

26. ftx conveniently funded some bogus studies, that left out zinc as catalyzing agents, to make sure that ivm would not be widely applied,

27. Michael, that’s a fascinating comment.
    Thanks very much…

28. And never forget, there may be some kind of innate resistance in the African genome (i.e., the prevalent genes common to that area — which would include many people of “close” african geneology, as opposed to those who have intermixed with Euros and Asians in the last couple centuries).

    There is no direct evidence of this I am specifically aware of, but could be, akin to the way Euros have a measure of innate resistance to HIV, due to their tendency to come from a gene pool that survived the Black Plague, which is distantly related. Genetics that resist the latter have some level of innate resistance to the former.

    I’m merely calling attention to the fact that sometimes this shit happens, just as there were purported efforts to spread smallpox among Amerinds in the 1800s (previous to the real understanding of disease vectors, but possible), by Euros who, having dealt with it for multiple centuries had more resistance than the Amerinds whose population had limited exposure. Same kind of thing. It’s certainly possible that one group or another has some level of innate resistance to certain different disease mechanisms, just as individuals do**.

    —–
    ** I don’t generally get the flu vaccine, because I almost never get the flu — perhaps 2, maybe 3 times in the last 15y — and even then, it’s like a 2-3 day issue, not a week or more, with lingering after. I seem to have a certain innate natural resistance, presumably thanks to the gift of my genes from my parents. I see no reason this kind of thing could not spread through a population, given the right opportunities.

29. P.S., one thing, I am getting older, and my doctor did recommend that I take Zinc, Quercitin, and add vitamin C** to my diet over and above the casual “Senior” one-a-day. He already had me taking a super-B-complex vitamin and vitamin D. Apparently all these tie to boosting and helping immune system response. If you are not taking these — especially if you’re older, but no matter your age, you should ask your doctor if there is any reason you should not (all are cheap via Amazon… if there is no medical reason to NOT do it, then, even if there is no clear evidence they DO help, it’s probably not a bad thing to take them — there is some evidence they do help, it’s just not always conclusive).

    ====
    **Not megadoses — just a regular vC supplement once a day. As I understand it, megadoses are often bad, as the body uses the same receptors for multiple things, so you can wind up with a deficiency in something as one of the megadoses crowds out one of the co-receptor intakes from getting something else.

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