Could Covid19 be the first full scale biological war fare experiment?

In March 28th I used the then known figures from the cruiser Diamond Princess to estimate the death rate for the world. Then 10 persons on the boat had died out of 3 700 passengers and crew which calculates to a death rate of 0,27%, but with the assumption that most on the boat were above 60 years of age I did a demographic recalculation and ended with 0,07% as expected death rate.

Since then the number of dead on the cruiser has increased with three and therefore a rough change of the death rate would end up with 0,09%. Of course, this is a moving target, still some are seriously ill, not all were infected, and I don’t have the detailed knowledge about the age and other pre-requisites about the passengers and crew onboard the boat.

But today, eight months later it is fair to say my estimations have been quite accurate and presenting a future that could have prepared people around the globe on what to expect.

In April I looked at the effect of no, partial or total lock down to prevent the disease and saw no support for any kind of lock down. Today we see Sweden, which seems to be the only country that has avoided a close down of the society, even though the Swedish politicians this Autumn have started to act as politicians around the world and forbidding gatherings of more than first 500, then 50 and lately 8 persons, to have a milder second wave than the first and many countries are catching up on death rate putting Sweden on 23rd place, previously at 10th place, with several runners up and soon to pass and have Sweden slide down the league table.

But when looking at the stats you cannot avoid the fact that there seems to be a lot of South American countries in the top as well as plenty of European ones, and most African and Asian further down, much further. I therefore decided to do further analysis, like grouping countries by five continents and a sixth group I call “islands”, figure 1. The reason for the sixth contingent is of course them being naturally cut off from other countries and possibly far away from any mainland.

It must be clearly stated that within each geography the differences are sometimes huge. Take for example Europe with Belgium (1407) at the very top and Norway (60) at the very bottom. And the death rate is generally much higher in the western part of Europe than the East with big populations like Russia, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and Greece to name a few which causes a modest death rate so far compared with Americas. This difference between western and eastern Europe is strange but a matter of fact.

The same goes for Africa with equally sized South Africa (359) and Tanzania (0). And if we take Middle East and compare neighboring Armenia with Azerbajdjzan you get a six times higher death rate for Armenia (666 to 114) while Georgia with borders to both countries is in between (254).

And why not compare Australia (35) with New Zeeland (5) when discussing differences? In Sweden this game of comparing Sweden, which from the start took another stand than most of the world on how the society should handle the virus, with its Nordic neighbors is taken as evidence that Sweden is doing wrong, and the others are right since Sweden’s death rate is much higher, of course no such conclusion can be made when looking at outcome in other countries in Europe.

This becomes obvious when looking at the islands. They are truly very different with regards to size and location wherefore I looked closer, grouping them into geographical areas and when possible to different oceans, figure 2.

And when comparing the islands as a group with proximity to a continent there is a difference between islands and mainland, except for Asia. This should of course suggest that isolation is relevant.

It should also be clear that Covid19 isn’t airborne with the pattern shown over geographical areas and differences between close countries and islands.

But looking closer I found surprisingly that independent islands have significantly lower death rates compared to those still ruled by either France, Britain or the Netherlands. So, there is a difference with regards to colonial ruling which is puzzling.

With this, and assuming the numbers are correct from all countries and no hiding or deliberate misclassification of death with or by Covid19, it is obvious that something else must be the reason for the differences. One could of course be genetic but let us leave that out for now since that data is not available to use in an analysis.

Based on information from the authorities about who dies because of or with Covid19, it seems as if elder people, especially very old, are more vulnerable than younger. It is also possible that distance is of importance according to the same authorities and that should be the case not only for distance in a city or in a restaurant but how close people live to each other. Urbanization should therefore be another relevant parameter to look at.

Therefore, I took the values for each geographical area and average age, as a matter of fact each country, and multiplied to get a value for how dense the elderly lives in each geography. Possibly there could be a difference how urban elder are between countries which cannot be seen in the average but that is what is available as data.

Suddenly a possible relation appears which would paint the broad picture of why the geographical regions differ. And since I in previous analysis have shown that lock downs doesn’t show any positive effect on death rates and use of protective mask is used heavily across all regions and countries with very different outcome in death rates, the age of population and urbanization seems to be much more relevant to understand the death rates.

When comparing with regular seasonal flu there seems to be no exact numbers counted for like with Covid19, instead WHO have studies on excess deaths due to the flu. But although age over 65 have the mayor share (67%) of deaths also in seasonal flu it is much more evenly spread over the world with rates of 0,0051% to 0,0062% which is not the case for Covid19. At this moment Africa and Asia are below the seasonal flu death rate. And this with Covid19 counting every death regardless of with or by Covid19 and not excess deaths (WHO estimates seasonal flu to cause 2% of annual respiratory deaths implying significant risk for calculation errors).

With values for average age and urbanization for France (34), Sweden (36), Iran (25), China (23) and Norway (33) you get death rate for Covid19 close to the line in figure 5 for France (0,08%), Sweden (0,07%) and Iran (0,06%). But China is ridiculously far away with its official numbers (0,0003%) as is Norway (0,006%). But if we compile China only with Wuhan numbers, we would get 0,04% which would be a relevant number but that is then only for Wuhan city and leaves us with questions unanswered like; are the official death figures correct for Wuhan and also for the rest of China and what is the average age in Wuhan? If we would count backwards assuming the same average age in Wuhan as China, the number of deaths should be twice as many as reported. Norway, with lowest death rate in Europe, is 10 times lower than expected. That should be of interest to most other European countries that have five times or higher death rates, together with the other lagging like Estonia, Finland and Latvia. What is the reason for them lagging at all?

One obvious possibility is number of foreign visitors and visits to other countries. It would be especially interesting to compare Chinese travelling to different geographical regions during 2019 and early 2020, their interaction with locals and countries as well as business and leisure travelers to China, since that was the cause of the outbreak. Unfortunately, that data isn’t available.

Besides average age and urbanization as macro drivers of death rate around the globe, we can also conclude that islands have lower death rates, which proves that being an island is like being rural area. On top of that I have found that independent islands have lower death rates than those who are governed by European countries, which in turn have high death rates, possibly due to visits from the ruling country and the other way around.

So why is Covid19 not evenly distributed around the globe as seasonal flu is said to be? Facts don’t support lock down or protective masks. Possibly a deep dive into general health conditions or genetics could shed some light, although that seems odd when looking at seasonal flu death rates.

Should we expect Asia, Africa and Middle East not to get much higher death rates as figure 5 shows? Or will we see the curve shift up leading to higher deaths rates in all countries closing at a mean of 0,09% which implies a death rate in Americas and Europe of 0,13%?

Regardless of that, the untold question is why there aren’t many more deaths in all of China which would be logical when looking at Europe and Americas and figure 5? China is the origin of Covid19 and would be expected to be in line with the macro drivers but isn’t and that raises many more questions and need for western scientists to go to China and to proper research instead of barking about protective masks and close down of societies which only benefits China.

Sources:

• Death rates have been calculated with published numbers from www.worldometers.info/coronavirus and the extracts are dated 20201128.
• Urban/rural and average age are fetched from www.populationof.net except on Taiwan which is from www.wikipedia.com.
• WHO Global mortality associated with seasonal influenza epidemics. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6815659/