SARS-CoV 2 (Covid-19) Heterogeneous Mortality Rates across Countries May Be Partly Explained by Life Expectancy, Calorie
- PDF / 300,031 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 66 Downloads / 143 Views
SARS-CoV 2 (Covid-19) Heterogeneous Mortality Rates across Countries May Be Partly Explained by Life Expectancy, Calorie Intake, and Prevalence of Diabetes. Smith G. Nkhata 1,2
&
Theresa N. Ngoma 1,2 & Praise M. Chilenga 2
Accepted: 11 October 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Keywords Calorie intake . Correlation . Covid-19 mortality . Life expectancy . Prevalence of diabetes . SARS-CoV 2
Introduction Severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV 2) causes coronavirus disease (Covid-19) that continues to kill people disproportionately across the world. More deaths are reported in developed countries than developing countries. This might be due to rigorous reporting in developed countries. Many developing countries are currently under-reporting Covid-19 cases due to poor health surveillance systems characteristic of those countries as well as lack of testing kits. As of 6th May 2020, US had reported over 1.2 million cases while most countries in Africa and the Middle East reported fewer cases (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/). At the same time US had conducted almost 7.7 million tests (over 23,000 tests per million population) while Russia and Germany had done 4.4 million (over 30,500 tests per million) and 2.5 million (over 30,000 tests per million) respectively. Relative to the number of tests conducted, San Marino had the highest deaths per million population (1200) while Belgium, Spain, Italy, and France had 700, 550, 480, 400 deaths per million population, respectively. These figures highlight significant heterogeneity in terms of fatality of Covid-19 across the globe. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-020-00191-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Smith G. Nkhata [email protected] 1
Agrofood Processing Technology, Faculty of Life Sciences and Natural Resources, Natural Resources College, Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, P. O Box 143, Lilongwe, Malawi
2
Food Technology, Faculty of Life Sciences and Natural Resources Natural Resources College, Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, P. O Box 143, Lilongwe, Malawi
A number of hypotheses have been developed to explain this heterogeneity in Covid-19 mortality. One is that countries where Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccines had been used have lower infection and mortality rates than those countries where BCG had never been used (Miller et al. 2020) though the evidence is lacking (Riccò et al. 2020). The second hypothesis is that countries where malaria is common and where hydroxychloroquine had previously been used have lower infection and mortality rates from Covid-19. Moreover, other studies have reported reduction in severity of Covid-19 symptoms after taking hydroxychloroquine (Chen et al. 2020; Gautret et al. 2020). However, some studies have found no evidence that hydroxychloroquine is helpful in severe cases of Covid-19 infection (Molina et
Data Loading...
