With Low Vaccination Rates, Africa's Covid Deaths Remain Far below Europe and the US

[Lain]

With Low Vaccination Rates, Africa's Covid Deaths Remain Far below Europe and the US | Ryan McMaken

Interesting article. Weird tone (of writing) but it is what it is.

 

[epronovost]

With Low Vaccination Rates, Africa's Covid Deaths Remain Far below Europe and the US | Ryan McMaken

Interesting article. Weird tone but it is what it is.

It's not really weird for several reason. First, African country's population is much, much younger than that of the US and even more so of Europe. COVID is mostly a dangerous disease for elderly people. In my Province (Quebec), the average age of COVID fatalities is 84 years old. They also have little testing done and neither do they have the means to track COVID as accurately as richer countries which skews statistics to lower number. Finally, urban density is lower in most African countries which slows down the spread of the disease.

 

[Watchmen]

COVID rates in South Africa aren’t that far behind the US. Also, they now have to contend with Omicron. Not sure yet how that will play out, but it seems responsible for most of the recent infections in Johannesburg. Also, populations with low immunity (whether through natural immunity or vaccinations), are prime spots for unmitigated mutation, which means we all live with this much much longer.

 

[Augustus]

Something like 25% of people in western countries are over 65, in Nigeria it's about 1%.

Unless you can compare rates in age groups (i.e. Rate in 40-50 year olds in each country) , it is pretty meaningless.

Could be the same Simpson's Paradox that has higher overall death rates among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated in some places, despite there being lower death rates for vaccinated in every single direct age group comparison. It's just a factor of the aggregation of data on unequal cohorts (in this case the lower age of the unvaccinated).

If anyone does have any of that data it would be interesting.