Why have there been low COVID death rates in Africa?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting article from August of 2021 about the relatively low death rates from COVID in Africa. One of its points is that there is evidence that more people in Africa were exposed to COVID and infected with it, at least at a subclinical or mild level, then the relatively small number of COVID tests done there had indicated. So why the better outcomes in Africa in terms of percentages coming down with serious disease? The difference doesn’t seem to reside in failure to report COVID deaths, either, nor was it Africans’ compliance with stringent government policies to reduce the spread. And the data there is probably mostly prior to the vaccine, so it’s not related to that. Africa has had lower rates than the Western industrialized world from the start.

It seems to be a real difference, in part because of this sort of thing:

Population structure and spatial distribution strongly predict the patterns of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in communities. Analysis of spatial and temporal clustering of populations shows a correlation between density/crowding and viral reproduction number. Africa is the least urbanized global region, with 55% of the continent’s population living in rural areas with wide variations across countries. Modelling shows greater reproduction rates in urban areas, and epidemiological data are skewed towards higher cases in urban areas across all countries

So there was somewhat less transmission in the first place because of the rural population distribution. Age of the population was a factor as well:

The small slice of the African population who are older (only 3% of the African population is 65+) live overwhelmingly at home, often with extended families spanning multiple generations. This alone explains a huge discrepancy in cases, as roughly one third to one half of deaths in wealthy countries, such as the U.S., have resulted from superspreading events in elderly nursing homes and assisted living facilities, providing the rationale for prioritizing the inoculation of these older individuals. While multiple family homes generally have more people in a shared space than the typical single-family homes of Western countries, this slightly increased risk of within-household spread is offset by the significantly decreased risk of large-scale superspreading events in the community, often caused by congregate nursing home settings

South Africa has a higher percentage of people in nursing homes than the rest of Africa does, and its COVID statistics indicate a higher death rate.

Africans also spend far more time outdoors and far less indoors than those in the West, also a factor in reducing COVID spread. When Africans are indoors they tend to be sleeping, but:

Even in the case of sleeping, these homes are often well ventilated with outside air, significantly reducing the chance of viral transmission when compared to tightly enclosed indoor spaces in developed countries. Additionally, higher temperatures and UV light intensity have been shown to predict SARS-CoV-2 spread, although the evidence is inconsistent. Prolonged, year-round outdoor living with direct exposure to UV light in mostly warm and tropical climates could partially explain reduced transmission…

But there was also less mortality in those in Africa who did contract COVID, and therein lies an especially interesting tale:

It is well known that people with pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, obesity, and hypertension have a greatly increased risk of moderate to severe complications from COVID-19 infection. Broadly, these conditions are considerably less prevalent in low income and lower middle income countries (LICs and LMICs) when compared to higher income countries (HICs)…

South Africa, which accounts for nearly 40% of all reported COVID-19 cases and deaths in the continent, reports an exceptionally high burden of NCDs…

…[A] recent cohort study in South Africa suggested that HIV was associated with a doubling of mortality risk of COVID-19. This is potentially significant to consider in explaining why South Africa has a disproportionate COVID-19 burden in the continent, given that it also has the greatest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world …

The phenomenon of trained immunity may be tempering the COVID-19 burden in the continent. Here, we focus on four elements underlying this hypothesis: (i) BCG [tuberculosis] vaccinations, (ii) exposure to varied commensal microorganisms, or the “hygiene hypothesis”, (iii) prevalence of infectious diseases, and (iv) historical use of herbal plants and remedies.

The four above categories are all interesting and well worth reading about, but the possibility of exposure to malaria and malaria medication having an effect is of special interest and is treated in section (iii), prevalence of infectious diseases. Here’s an excerpt:

This pathogenic environment [in Africa] precipitates the wide use of antibiotics, antimalarials, and other drugs to treat NTDs, such as azithromycin and ivermectin often distributed through mass drug administrations, which might counteract to mitigate COVID-19 morbidity. In particular, used widely over several decades in SSA, ivermectin has been spotlighted as a potential treatment for COVID-19, including by the NIH. Researchers have postulated that “circulating viruses or parasites in the African subcontinent” could explain high SARS-CoV-2 antibody seropositivity. For instance, of 228 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2018, 93% were in SSA [sub-Saharan Africa]. Notably, South Africa is not generally endemic for malaria and other NTDs. Intense malaria exposure (which is frequent in many rural areas in SSA and much less so in urban areas, and not at all in South Africa or in northern Africa countries) has a strong influence on the immune system and could contribute to a better trained immunity. It is possible that infection by malaria alone may overstimulate the immune system and confer an immune advantage when compared to nonexposed populations. To further investigate this potential role, as very few to no communities outside of Africa are holo-endemic for the disease, mechanistic studies would be needed to determine if there is cross-immunity between malaria and SARS-CoV-2 exposure.

There are also possible genetic factors, including one the article doesn’t mention: a population’s proportion of Neanderthal genes. It first occurred to me that this was a factor while watching a YouTube video on Neanderthals (I no longer recall which video) that mentioned that Neanderthal DNA contains some genes that predispose carriers to a more severe reaction to COVID and a greater likelihood of death from it (also see this).

There are probably a host of factors explaining the African results, not just one or two. The issue highlights the complexity that is often discovered when trying to analyze why COVID vulnerability differs from one population to another.

Geoff Duncan of Georgia, what a guy

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems there’s an awful lot of fake sanctity going around these days – for example, Georgia’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan. Ah, such virtue! Such principles! Perhaps Duncan will have a future someday with that pinnacle of moral rectitude and intellectual rigor, CNN:

Duncan is really the epitome of why so many people on the right detest the politicians they refer to as the GOPe.

Not that Duncan gets any credit for virtue among the many Warnock-admirers who seem to constitute the entire comment pool at that YouTube video I just linked. The comments prominently include mockery for Duncan’s supposedly standing in line while knowing who the candidates were, and then not voting – something few people think actually is the truth. Another typical response was that of course he voted for the obviously-superior Warnock but didn’t want his fellow Republicans to know it. Alternatively, some thought he actually voted for the terrible awful no-good worst-ever candidate Herschel Walker (they never give a specific example of why they say he’s so beneath contempt; apparently it’s supposed to be self-evident) and was too ashamed to admit it.

And all of those commenters would probably have voted for Fetterman without hesitation had they lived in Pennsylvania.

The ingenuous Bankman-Fried

The New Neo Posted on by

I happened to catch this yesterday on YouTube, and was fascinated and repulsed by the odious Bankman-Fried and his apologists who reek of equal measures of mendacity and fake sanctity. It struck me, not for the first time, that this should be farce and yet it’s reality:

There’s no reason any of this should surprise me, given the antics of our current president and his family, as well as the Democrats and the press. The most outrageous lies, the most destructive policies, are met with solemn and sometimes fawning approval. There is so much rottenness around that Bankman-Fried’s preposterous pose of innocent naivete is nowhere near the worst of it.

[ADDENDUM: Also see this.]

Radical leftism then and now: defiance versus compliance

The New Neo Posted on by

I mentioned this in a comment the other day, but I think it bears repeating. For students of the 60s and early 70s, radical leftism was a stance of defiance rather than compliance with much of what they were being taught in universities, unlike today.

This means that back then the left involved somewhat different type of people with somewhat different personalities, although the older leftists ended up being the teachers and mentors of today’s leftists. Once that happened, the mantra of the old left wasn’t “question authority” but “follow our authority; we know best.”

And yet I believe that the leftist youth of today still think of themselves as rebels rather than followers. After all, though they are compliant with their professors, many disagree with their own parents and grandparents. To that end – thinking of themselves as rebels – they also keep feeling they have to up the ante and become more and more strident and outrageous in their demands, in order to differentiate themselves from said older leftist mentors.

Therefore some of the battles in recent years on the left have been between the fading Boomer old-school left and the young left. The old supposedly-held values of free speech, and the belief in objective truth, can now be jettisoned because the left is in control. Why even let their opponents on the right speak? They see no reason; no reason at all.

Trump’s dinner with Kanye

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed that so far I’ve ignored the Trump/Kanye/Fuentes/Yiannopoulos dinner story. My gut feeling was that it was probably designed to dupe Trump and set him up for the attacks that followed. Should he have seen through it and prevented it, even though the extra guests were sprung on him? Yes.

The entire thing is depressing and exhausting, like so much of politics these days, and emblematic of the way we’ve descended into what might be called parody if it was the least bit funny.

So I’ll just say that I pretty much agree that this piece sounds plausible, the premise of which is that “Trump’s Meeting With Kanye Was Planned to ‘Make Trump’s Life Miserable’ and the Plan Worked.”

NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on the 1981 movie “My Dinner With Andre,” which I didn’t much like.

Maricopa fight highlights the bitter disagreements between the GOPe and the Trump wing

The New Neo Posted on by

The battle in Maricopa County at this point is mostly among Republicans. It’s a familiar one that’s been waged for as long as I can remember noticing anything about politics on the right, although the terms to refer to each Republican wing keep changing, as do the details of what they support and what they oppose. When I was very young, the sides used to be called the Rockefeller Republicans and the Goldwater Republicans, for example.

Recall that Goldwater came from Arizona. And so did the 2008 candidate detested by the non-GOPe wing, John McCain.

So the bitterness between Republicans concerning the voting in Maricopa County is the latest iteration. Kari Lake has this to say:

“This botched election should not be certified, especially in Maricopa County, where the board of supervisors are well aware of the catastrophic issues caused by the maladministration of Supervisor Bill Gates and County Recorder Steven Richer, who started a dark money PAC with the sole purpose of going after me, my campaign, and our movement while they supervised the election (emphasis added),” Lake revealed. “Let me repeat that: They ran an election with my name on the ballot, and their number one political goal was to see to it that I was not elected. Can you say, ‘conflict of interest’?”

Both Gates and Richer are Republicans, but they are not keen on Lake and her so-called “election denial” and in fact Gates was in charge in 2020, a year about which she was criticizing the results. He’s been upset about the audit that was done concerning the voting that year; after all, it’s an implicit criticism of his leadership. Back in 2021 he had this to say about it:

“The 2020 election … was the best election we’ve ever run in Maricopa County,” said Bill Gates, vice chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. Gates, a Republican, called criticism of the election results a “staggering refusal to follow the will of the voters.”

He said that in addition to the routine checks, the county supervisors authorized two audits that found no hacking or manipulation with the voting machines used in the election.

“It should have ended there,” Gates said.

So when Kari Lake ran on the idea that the 2020 election wasn’t on the up-and-up, she was attacking Bill Gates, who was still running the show. In this article from September of 2022, in the buildup to the midterms, we learn this:

“Unfortunately, all these election deniers were successful here in Arizona, in a swing state,” said Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which has faced vitriolic backlash for defending the 2020 election against Trump’s false claims of fraud. “So we’ll see if those folks are able to win in the general election. I think that will give us a feel on where this party is headed in the future.”

Gates was censured by Legislative District 3 Republicans last month for saying election-denying GOP candidates may have to lose for the party to find its way.

You can’t call him a disinterested party. And of course Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor who was declared the winner, is the opposite of a disinterested party and should have recused herself. I’d actually say the same for Gates.

NOTE: If there hadn’t been widespread malfunction of the voting machines in Maricopa on Election Day, I doubt we’d be talking about this now. And yet so far I haven’t seen any acknowledgement by Gates and/or Hobbs that the situation in Maricopa on Election Day was terrible and could not help but raise suspicions. As far as I can tell, they seem to be acting as though all the brouhaha is manufactured and they have nothing to explain and nothing of which to be ashamed. If anyone can find any acknowledgement by these players of the serious problems involved in the 2022 elections in Maricopa, please post a link in the comments.

Farm seizures planned in the Netherlands

The New Neo Posted on by

I have written at some length before on the government’s war on farmers in the Netherlands, so I refer you to this series of previous posts of mine: this and this, as well as this related post on efforts in Canada.

So now we have the next step:

The Dutch government plans to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to comply with EU nature preservation rules…

The Netherlands is attempting to cut down its nitrogen pollution and will push ahead with compulsory purchases if not enough farms take up the offer voluntarily.

Farmers will be offered a deal “well over” the worth of the farm, according to the government plan that is targeting the closure of 2,000 to 3,000 farms or other major polluting businesses.

More here:

The state-backed “emission reduction” drive in the Netherlands is part of a more extensive EU climate campaign as Brussels doubles down on its radical globalist agenda despite a record rise in food and fuel prices across the Continent…

Faced with a government-backed climate onslaught, Dutch farmers are organizing themselves politically. They have fielded a new political party called the Boer Burger Beweging (BBB), or the Farmer-Citizen Movement.

Founded in 2019, the BBB has succeeded in creating a nationwide footprint. “In next year’s provincial elections, which will also decide representation in the Dutch senate, or Eerste Kamer, the BBB is fielding more than 300 candidates in all 12 provinces. In recent polls, the party ranks fourth of the 17 leading parties in the Netherlands,” the UK-based Guardian newspaper reported earlier this month.

There’s a similar farmers’ movement in Germany.

For quite some time I’ve mentioned that climate scientist Judith Curry is my favorite go-to person for what I consider sanity on climate-change issues. I haven’t seen her address the farm/nitrogen situation directly, but I recommend this recent interview with her on the entire subject of governments and climate in general. She’s so reasonable that it’s no wonder she was driven from academia:

Apple and the China riots

The New Neo Posted on by

Apple had a role in the recent demonstrations in China:

AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby…

Apple didn’t respond to questions about the AirDrop change. It plans to make the “Everyone for 10 Minutes” feature a global standard next year, according to Bloomberg…

But why did Apple rush out the change unannounced, in an unassuming update to iOS in early November, and apply it only to Chinese iPhones? One clue may lie in what happened the month prior, when Xi Jinping’s anointment to a third term as China’s leader was met with rare displays of public dissent…

Apple has repeatedly helped China control dissent, mostly by removing apps that protestors have used to coordinate, communicate, or gather information. (Quartz’s iOS app was removed by Apple, at China’s request, at the height of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong.)

China is a huge market for Apple. Plus, there’s this:

Protests have erupted at the world’s biggest iPhone factory in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, according to footage circulated widely online.

Videos show hundreds of workers marching, with some confronted by people in hazmat suits and riot police.

Those livestreaming the protests said workers were beaten by police. Videos also showed clashes…

Last month, rising Covid cases saw the site locked down, prompting some workers to break out and go home. The company then recruited new workers with the promise of generous bonuses.

Footage shared on a livestreaming site showed workers shouting: “Defend our rights! Defend our rights!”

Other workers were seen smashing surveillance cameras and windows with sticks.

“They changed the contract so that we could not get the subsidy as they had promised. They quarantine us but don’t provide food,” said one Foxconn worker during his live stream.

Recently I was thinking about the early days of the rapprochement with China during the Nixon era. Remember those table tennis tournaments with players from a country we knew so little about? Remember the reassurances that China would become more like us as it industrialized and interacted more and more with the West? I don’t recall much if any discussion of the idea that the influence would be working the other way around, and that we’d become more and more like them. And yet that seems to be the case.

Here’s Mike Pompeo in 2020 on the Nixon opening:

Pompeo didn’t want to directly undermine Nixon’s supposed accomplishment. “I want to be clear that he did what he believed was best for the American people at the time, and he may well have been right,” Pompeo said of Nixon’s diplomacy with the Chinese.

Pompeo’s use of the word “may” was telling. Maybe Nixon was right—or maybe he wasn’t. Given the substance of his speech, it is quite possible that Pompeo thinks Nixon was wrong…

“The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce,” Pompeo said. He later added a stark warning: “If the free world doesn’t change—doesn’t change, communist China will surely change us.” Again, one suspects Pompeo may think Nixon got it wrong.

The whole article is well worth reading. It also purports to explain what China wanted from letting the US in during Nixon’s tenure.

NOTE: There were some people who weren’t pleased with Nixon’s China advances early on, however. There was some opposition from conservatives, but it had to do with a perceived betrayal of Taiwan involved in making nice to mainland China. Nor do I think China’s entry into the Western sweepstakes could have been long postponed, anyway.