SRAS-Cov2 : Typical counter-measures and lethality in early 2021

A second wave of Covid-19 variants was observed in the last quarter 2020 until now (2021, February 11). The John Hopkins University (JHU) collects data since the first wave in 2020 and countries adopt different strategies when they are deeply impacted, although it is not the case for all (lethality in African countries remains low).

Apart from recent ARN-based drugs, containments, lockdown, quarantine and detection (tests) are main preventive counter-measures deployed by governments. Curative counter-measures are mainly corticoids, antibiotics, derivated of quinine, then oxygen and intensive cares for extreme cases.

All strategies aim at reducing the lethality due to severe pulmonar affections on populations - SRAS-Cov2. In France and other countries, most of the daily news remain focused on detected cases more than prematured deaths statistics. When displayed, statistics show no relation with the quantities of inhabitants per country so do not figure out any clear idea of the real situation to audiences, providing wide-open doors to speculative logics.

The JHU dataset makes possible to compute a percentage of lethality per inhabitants. It enables to get a normalized rate for an easy-to-understand visualisation of combined counter-measures effects on the epidemia and its most important issue: prematured deaths.

As an exemple, India whose population is 1.38 billions of inhabitants deployed a complex containment strategy, based on a large number of zones at mutiple geographic scales, combined with a massive access to low-cost drugs such as derivative of quinin and corticoids.

France, whose inhabitants represent only 5% of the Indian population (67 M. of h.) choosed containment and light containment, with two levels of restrictions for the whole country, but prohibited the massive prescription of curative drugs from local medecine - e.g. derivatives of quinine.

Italia (60 M. of h.), who deployed stricter containment rules than France but for a shorter period at the end of year 2020, had also prohibited the delivery of derivative of quinine from local medecine but finally authorized it again in december 2020 (2020/12/11).

Spain (47 M. of h.) did not authorized it but stopped containments, just keeping the application of emergency state with restricted travels from a region to another.

According to the JHU data for these representative countries,(France, India, Italy and Spain, the lethality percentage per day remained below 0.0012% (12 for 1 M.) of the population with an average rate at 0.00043% (4 per M.), in critical period such as presented below (Fig.1).

For comparison on a year, tobacco kills about 0.11% of the population in France every year, with about 73 000 prematured deaths, i.e. 12% of all deaths in 2019. About 80 000 prematured deaths were attibuted to SRAS-Cov2 from 2020/01 to 2021/02, or 0.12% of the French population and 13% of the 613 243 deceases recorded by France in 2019.

Fig. 1: SRAS-Cov2 lethality by inhabitant from 2020/10/01 to 2021/02/11

In Fig.1 above, curves represent the daily average lethality (mobile average on 7 days), based on the JHU dataset and the number of inhabitants known by countries (2021).

Since October (2020), France (blue curve) presented a lethality percentage slightly higher than Spain but the trend changed since the end of January (2021).

Spain (red curve) and France followed similar trends until France started "light containment" on the whole territory (2020, december 15) while Spain just kept emergency measures, for economical reasons.

India (orange curve) and Italia (yellow curve) kept a daily lethality extremely lower than Spain and France, although Indian inhabitants are 22 times more numerous than Spanish ones, density is significantly higher and hygiene conditions harsher in certain zones. India regulates the propagation of Covid19 with an adaptative containment plan cutting the territory in zones, with restrictions that can change from a zone to another and hundreds of zones for a city such as New Delhi. Local medecine is predominant and low-cost drugs are massively distributed as preventive and curative weapons. Despite of India have recourse to both containment and distributed prescriptions from local medecine, lethality rate stopped lowering since january 2021 while remaining extremely lower than in France, Spain and Italy.

NDLA. Japan (not represented) also show low percentages similar to India. Anyhow, the JHU data might represent the ground truth as well as only show trends, depending on the way deceases are categorized in each country (Covid vs. other tight causes).

First reaching high lethality percentages, Italy appears to be the only country among the four presented that found a solution to constantly lower lethality since december 2020. As India, it combines curative and preventive actions with the reintroduction of the derivatives of quinine in local medecnie, short but strict containments in critical periods and emergency measures reducing economical costs that France has not found how to preserve by now. France and Spain saw their lethality rates slowly increasing since january 2021 with no visible changes observable although vaccination campaigns started since January (2021/01/20 in France).

Displaying daily PCR tests results without tests counts and comparison to numbers of inhabitants makes more noise than information to most of us. These observations were supplied in response to daily repetitions of unclear or irrelevant information and statistics, so as to help each one in finding by himself a first and neutral insight about some representative combinations of preventive and/or curative strategies and their effects. They do not measure the damages to economy resulting from deployed strategies.

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