We’re just coming out of what would be the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. How is Africa doing with coronaplague?
A European friend offered a theory that the countries with the highest death rates from coronavirus are those that were keeping the largest population of frail elderly people alive via high-tech health care. If you’re dependent on machines to live, he reasoned, you’re an easy target for flu or COVID-19 or any other virus.
This kind of analysis was used by some economics professors in “16 Possible Factors for Sweden’s High COVID Death Rate among the Nordics” (PDF download available for free; layperson’s summary by one of the authors). Sweden had been rather fortunate for a few years relative to its neighbors in terms of deaths among its frail and elderly. In addition to its larger low-skill immigrant population, this supersized frail/elderly population provided easy targets for the virus and may have accounted for about half of Sweden’s extra COVID-19 deaths.
Where the analysis would seem to break down is Peru. The country isn’t notable for a huge population of people on advanced life support and yet it has had a very high COVID-19 death rate (also one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns plus universal masks).
The WHO dashboard shows a lot of African countries with low death rates, even lower than one might expect given the low median age within those countries (Nigeria’s median age is 18, for example, compare to about 38 here in the U.S. (varies by ethnicity/race), 41 in Sweden, and 27 in Peru).
From my Africa pictures:
(That’s Cape Town from the sCessna 210 that my friend flew there from North Carolina. Crossing multiple oceans and mountain ranges in a 1970s single-engine piston airplane with a gasoline-filled ferry tank in the back seat is just as safe as ever, but the trip would be illegal today so as to protect everyone from the hazards of coronavirus.)
Two decades back I spent quite a bit of time in South America as well as in Africa. Based on my observations it was rare to see Africans who lived much beyond 60 while that was a lot more common in Peru. Also Peruvians were much fatter than people in Africa. Your European friend might not be far off in their assessment. Those with underlying morbidities in Africa may already be dead.