If ivermectin ever made a difference to COVID-19 outcomes in Africa, it sure didn't in Latin and South America

Wide distribution of ivermectin in Africa to combat river blindness does not appear to have had anything to do whatsoever with low death rates from COVID-19 in places like Angola (62 deaths per million of population), Kenya (120), and Nigeria (16).

It turns out that ivermectin was widely distributed in eight Latin and South American countries from June, August, and December 2020, but all of them had steeply higher death rates from the disease:

Peru 6,945

Brazil 3,396

Mexico 2,654

Panama 2,089

Bolivia 1,974

Guatemala 1,222

Honduras 1,165

El Salvador 652.

 

Exposure to fresh air and full spectrum sunlight with its infrared and ultraviolet radiation has been shown to speed recovery from the disease:

 

 

The ugly Americans' ugly children

 

Overall, adults in the U.S. are least likely to say that kids having good manners is an especially important quality — just 52% of them said so in 2017, according to a report released this month by King’s College London. That makes the U.S. the country least likely, of the 24 countries surveyed in recent years, to believe good manners are crucial for kids.

This is a significant drop from 1990, when 76% of U.S. adults said it was a very important quality for children to possess, the data shows. …

Another factor that falls under the broader idea of kids being well behaved is if they listen to their parents or other adults. But even fewer U.S. adults said that obedience was a key quality for kids — in fact, it fell far behind in all countries compared with having good manners.

The country that values obedience the most is Nigeria with 58%, followed by Mexico and Egypt with 57% and 56% respectively. The U.S. falls into the second half of the table with 21%.

The whole thing is here.

The decline was inevitable, I suppose, with the decline of religion.

But things were already bad enough in 1958.

They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They are loud and ostentatious:

 

 

 

LOL, fear-mongering spending lunatic at The Daily Beast gets nothing right about Nigeria, which has Africa's largest economy and a COVID-19 death record 55 TIMES better than the world's, and: "A few trillion in U.S. government spending isn't a lot of money"

Gee, and Nigeria is only 14% jabbed . . . after all this time.

The U.S. is COVAX’s biggest donor, but not its most generous. Both Germany and Japan have donated a greater share of their gross domestic product. And another big injection of American money looks unlikely as Republicans pull tight the purse strings.

That means fewer vaccines for poorer countries as the pandemic grinds toward its fourth year and vaccination rates in the poorest countries remain stubbornly low—14 percent in Nigeria, for example, compared to the global rate of 63 percent. Starving COVAX “will only enhance global inequities,” Gostin said. ... A few trillion in U.S. government spending, spread out over years, arguably isn’t a lot of money . . ..

More.

Coronavirus deaths in Africa's "ivermectin" states are a fraction of what they are in their counterpart countries Brazil, Peru, and Spain

Brazil: 3.3m sq mi; population 213m

Nigeria: 357k sq mi; population 211m; deaths 0.42% of Brazil's

 

Peru: 496k sq mi; population 33m

Angola: 481k sq mi; population 32m; deaths 0.45% of Peru's

 

Spain: 195k sq mi; population 47m

Kenya: 224k sq mi; population 48m: deaths 4.3% of Spain's

 

COVID-19 in the largest countries by population: Update for Sun 5/2/21

Countries with 200 million population or more: China, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria.

Data isn't available in all categories for all countries, and data quality varies dramatically.

One should assume figures in the Big Seven are more or less gross underestimations except in the USA. 

China in particular is a JOKE. Why anyone takes them seriously as a "global partner" is beyond me. Show me an honest communist and I will give you six free winning lotto numbers.

Hospital reporting is the worst. Very few countries report the data at all, which tells you they are neither motivated nor equipped to do so even though this is a pretty serious situation which is over one year old. Given how important that data is in judging the progress and severity of the pandemic, it is more than discouraging. The top five for hospitalizations are all US and Europe, the difference between true civilization and the rest being that we know the numbers at all.

The situations in Brazil and especially India are alarming given the high positivity rate in India and the high death rate in Brazil. Reports concentrating on India underreporting deaths (from Reuters and the like) in recent weeks are a sick joke compared with neighboring China which the charts say is a COVID utopia. India is a developing nation struggling to cope under an enormous strain while still remaining part of the free world, but journalists would rather criticize it than question China's glaring effrontery. The myopia is damning.

These Big Seven represent 4.065 billion of the world's population of 7.79 billion, 52.2%, and we don't have a clear picture of what's really going on with them.

What reason would there be to think positively?

Daily new cases, and deaths, per million in the US are still at last summer levels and have not made new lows. Same with hospitalizations. Case positivity is rising again and is actually at 5.8%, provisionally, in this data. Previous very recent levels in the 7s, however, have simply vanished from the record. Why? Johns Hopkins is currently showing 4%. What to believe?

Vaccinations still can't be pointed to for lowering the US numbers because the numbers remain too high. I'm sure they'll point to them once they decline as evidence for vaccine efficacy. Seasonality will be ignored. I will leave a vaccination horror story update for a separate, future post.

Why have cases and deaths and hospitalizations ebbed and flowed in the past in the absence of vaccines? I predict they'll never really say, same as we hear no good explanation for why H1N1 from 2009 simply dropped off the radar. Why did it go away despite the vaccine against it turning into a giant flop? 

They can't predict pandemics' comings and goings anymore than they can predict global cooling in the 1970s, global warming in the 2000s, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 or the end of the Reagan Bull in 2000.

Man is a worm, according to the Bible, a poor player upon the stage, according to Shakespeare, an idiot whose tale is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing!

 

daily new cases per million

daily new deaths per million

case positivity rate

share of population vaccinated usa v world

Top five countries for C19 hospitalizations

share vaccinated in the largest countries by population

 

daily new deaths/million

daily new cases/million

Nigeria, Kenya and Angola, all of which have widely used ivermectin for years against parasitical disease, all have enviable COVID records compared with their similarly sized counterparts Brazil, Spain and Peru

 

 

The constant drumbeat in the US is how coronavirus hurts people of color proportionally more than it does whites, when these African countries which widely prescribe ivermectin have done astoundingly better than their counterpart countries by population in the West, as shown in these case graphs. And Nigeria has the added disadvantage of the three comparisons of being far more densely populated than Brazil but Brazil is 2nd worst in the world for COVID deaths.

Deaths

Brazil v Nigeria: 295k v 2k

Spain v Kenya: 74k v 2k

Peru v Angola: 50k v 0.5k

Update for COVID-19 English-speaking world case fatality rates as of 1/19/21

 Per Johns Hopkins University (data changes slightly as we write):

Global totals:

deaths 2,044,445 / cases 95,703,104

Case fatality rate 2.13%

G-7 nations Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, US, plus Australia and New Zealand:

deaths 713,992 / cases 36,041,142

Case fatality rate 1.98%

Rest of the world 2.23% 

Ten other nations with the largest English-speaking populations (India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Philippines, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Russia, Thailand, South Africa / data quality obviously varies):

deaths 295,121 / cases 17,399,153 

Case fatality rate 1.69% 

South Korea, not shown above, is a good example of how no matter what nations seem to do to stop the spread of the disease, case fatality rates everywhere seem to be ending up in the vicinity of 2%.

Early on South Korea was impressing with a rate well below 1%, but today it is at 1.75%. Japan is up to 1.33%. Much vaunted New Zealand is up to 1.10%.

Compared with Canada 2.51%, France 2.38%, Germany 2.32%, Italy 3.45%, the UK 2.61%, and Australia 3.16%, the good ole USA 1.657% is doing much better than the hysterical headlines would have you believe.

That said, in the US COVID-19 is still sixteen and half times more deadly than influenza. This is a serious crisis, the long term health effects of which are not known.

A recent long term study from May to November in the US showed an alarming rise in hospitalizations for COVID among children. Another study from the UK indicated an alarming rise in the death rate for individuals six months after recovering from COVID. The impact of the disease on the human vascular system is typically acute in the lungs, but remains a still not well understood threat to the rest of the body and its organs.

You don't want to get it. 24 million in the US already have, just 7% of the population.  

Ten shit-hole rivers in Asia and Africa responsible for 90% of plastic polluting the world's oceans

 Seven of the ten are communist with Chinese characteristics:

Yangtze River, China (1.5 million tonnes annually and worst offender)

Hai he River, China 

Yellow River, China 

Mekong River, China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam

Pearl River, China and Vietnam

Indus River, China, India and Pakistan 

Ganges River, India and Bangladesh

Amur River, Russia and China 

Nile River, eleven countries including Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya

Niger River, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Benin and Nigeria 

Just 10 rivers carry 90% of plastic polluting the oceans

 

Muslim Fulani kill 6,000 Christians in Nigeria in the first half of 2018, "white supremacy" blah blah blah

'Pure Genocide': Over 6,000 Nigerian Christians Slaughtered, Mostly Women and Children

WaPo disagrees with Obama, lists 10 Islamic countries where punishing homosexuals with death is normal

Nothing radical or extreme about it, only to Obama and other liberals.

Here:

Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates.

Incompetent FBI Interviewed T. Tsarnaev In 2011, Overlooked Travel In 2012

What we have after all these billons of tax dollars wasted by DHS, TSA, FBI and the rest of the federal alphabet soup is another case of the one that got away. The "security" was just theatre.

As one astute guest said yesterday on the Sean Hannity show, nobody at the FBI remembered a guy whom they interrogated personally in 2011 (after being alerted by the Russians in 2010) when they reviewed photo and video evidence of the bombing in Boston showing Tamerlan Tsarnaev in April 2013. That's right. It took a victim, Jeff Bauman, to finger Tamerlan's brother to get to Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

And now Sen. Lindsey Grahamnesty is claiming the exit of Tamerlan Tsarnaev to visit Russia in 2012 for what looks like six months of terrorist training was missed by the FBI because his name was misspelled.

That was the same problem with the Fruit of Kaboom bomber, who got on a flight to the US because even though he was supposed to be on a no-fly list his name, Abdulmutallab, was misspelled by a government employee, as reported here:

"Officials say the failed plot also tipped them off to the potentially serious consequences of a small mistake: a spelling error. The State Department incorrectly spelled Abdulmutallab's name on his visa application. When Abdulmutallab's father warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria that his son had been radicalized, embassy staffers couldn't find Abdulmutallab's name in their visa database — because it was entered with an incorrect spelling."

That was months before the flight to Detroit.

As I've maintained before, people who can't spell are dangerous.

CBS story here.

Washington Times story here.

UK Guardian None Too Happy Sarkozy Played Muslim Card

In an editorial, here, about the one and only debate between Sarkozy and Hollande:

At one point Mr Sarkozy plumbed new depths in a campaign which had already turned xenophobic to recapture ground from Marine Le Pen. This was where he explained that he was not bothered about Canadian or Norwegian immigrants getting the vote, but Algerian, Malian and Nigerian ones – the Muslim ones of course: "Community tensions come from whom and they come from where?" This was the Sarkozy of old, the former interior minister of raw political ambition who earned the loathing of his colleagues by calling delinquents rabble, and promising to cleanse minority suburbs with a Kärcher high-pressure water hose.

The Original Birthers: The Nigerian Observer