5 ms·

"The paper speculated that this might be due to cross-reactivity with proteins from the “common cold” coronaviruses”, and raised the possibility that there migh

"The paper speculated that this might be due to cross-reactivity with proteins from the “common cold” coronaviruses”, and raised the possibility that there might be a part of the population that has at least some existing protection against the current pandemic." ...this might explain why different parts of the world (e.g. east Asia, including Australia and New Zealand, vs. western Europe) have vastly different outcomes that don't seem to correlate well to genetics, culture, or policy. If a "common cold" coronavirus hit east Asia in the past, but never made it to western Europe, it could explain the different impact.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jhpriestley 6y ago
The virus spread quite well in Wuhan and the South Korean church though. Why do you dismiss the significant policy differences as a sufficient explanation?
- adventured 6y ago
  It fails to explain why countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia have so few deaths. There are 470 million people between those three Asian nations, and fewer deaths than in Canada (which has done a very sound job against the virus). Indonesia has as many deaths as Sweden, with ~26 times the population. The Philippines has 1,846 deaths vs Brazil which has 82,771. Bangladesh has 2,751 deaths, 30% of what Germany has, despite Bangladesh having nearly twice as many people. The Germans responded in extraordinary fashion to the virus. Bangladesh has so few deaths because their response was vastly superior, better funded, better organized, technologically superior in its testing and tracing? Comeon. The Philippines had an amazing response to the virus compared to Germany or Canada or Brazil or Switzerland? No way. There's definitely more going on there, including an impact from the different climates. It's entirely reasonable that some parts of Asia could have greater immune protection due to past virus exposures.
  - pavs 6y ago
    Becausr none of these countriest are telling you corrent mortality number. There are openly fuzzing the numbers and actively suppresing domestic jounalists with laws that protects the government from criticisms. This is atleast true for Bangladesh (where I am from), India, philipines and vietnam. To the best of my knowledge. There is absolutely no reason to believe that something magical is happening in this part of world. People are dying, infection rate extemely high. They are being highly under-reported.
    - L_Rahman 6y ago
      Let's leave Vietnam out of this. They're not hiding their numbers. It's difficult for the rest of the world to admit this, but Vietnam beat the virus because their leadership acted quickly, ruthlessly and over time. In the early days of the outbreak Vietnam didn't have rigorous contact tracing setup, so if a case turned out positive they simply shut down the entire neighborhood for two weeks. Once the source was mostly international cases, they also shut their borders and made no exceptions, not even for trading partners begging to let a handful of people in. But most importantly, even when case numbers went down into single digits, they kept up total lockdown for an additional two weeks. This saved them from making the mistake Korea made in removing social distancing restrictions the day before a major 5 day weekend which seeded the country and we've been squashing spot fires here ever since. Authoritarian regimes that have earned public trust through effective governance are probably the countries best suited to manage a pandemic like this one. It's just there are very few of them so it's hard to think of such countries as a category.
      - rossdavidh 6y ago
        But none of that would matter, given that there are millions of people on the planet who have it, and they will continually get reinfected. Whereas, a previous cold virus that gave some significant portion of them immunity, would matter. Also, South Korea's death numbers (and Vietnam's) both look pretty good compared to any nation in western Europe.
  - thevagrant 6y ago
doliveira 6y ago
Do you really find it easier to explain the different impact with genetic differences rather than simply different government policies and cultures? What about it doesn't correlate again?
leafboi 6y ago
I think it's hygiene related. I hypothesize that people living in countries with low hygiene have more exposure to diseases and thus better immunity. Examine India: In India, People throw trash everywhere, defecate everywhere, piss everywhere, wipe their rear ends with their hands, eat with their hands, and also shake other peoples' hands with the same hands... In general, it's well known that India is a pretty low hygienic country. Which may explain this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52435463 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52435463 Basically low hygiene exposes people to more diseases allowing their bodies to develop greater immunity inline with the quotation you mentioned above. There may be a correlation. I just gave some anecdotal data... Maybe some data scientist can find the correlation between two quantitative datasets: quantitative hygiene levels by country and deaths/infections of covid-19 by country.
- kasperset 6y ago
  One of the contributing factor may also be under reporting of deaths attributed to Covid-19 in these countries.
- op03 6y ago
  The data is all garbage. Data in India has a long way to travel from village to town to district to state to the national level. At each stage all kind of errors intentional and unintentional enter the system. All these errors keep accumulating as they move up the food chain. By the time it reaches the top (and it takes its sweet time) god knows what it actually means. Just to make things more interesting there is major fudging at the end of the chain to make it fit what was produced by the system over the previous years, cause budgets and all kinds of plans and policies that are based on prior garbage will start imploding otherwise. The interesting thing Covid has done is expose how bad those numbers are because the regional govts for the first time are dutifully releasing Daily Data from the morgues. That data leaks out non-covid deaths, which should more or less match non-covid deaths/mortality rate data reported from prior years. And it doesn't. By large factors. (Google non covid mortality rate for whatever city and compare with historic numbers in the national data portal) Your hypothesis assumes they are all not dying from low hygiene. They probably are, in large numbers, and are just not being counted.
wolco 6y ago
There are two different strains. An older one based in Asia that appears weaker. A newer one found in Italy. This research came out months ago but no one is mentioning this.
- crowbahr 6y ago
  Was the research peer reviewed? Published in any journals? Rigorous? Documented?
  - networkimprov 6y ago
    It was reported in the NYTimes, FWIW.
  - noodlenotes 6y ago
    They're referring to a paper published in Cell. "Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus" https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30820-5.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30820-5.pdf There's a more infectious mutation that overtakes the original form wherever it spreads, including Asia, although it's not more severe. I guess Asian countries would have an advantage because they faced the original form first and got their act together, while Europe and the East Coast of the US faced the more infectious variant early on. (The West Coast, on the other hand, started out with the original form, probably because the virus came directly from Asia. The variant didn't even show up in the Bay Area until May, for example.)
    - twic 6y ago
      It's true that the G614 form overtook the D614 form, but that is not necessarily because it's more infectious - it could be drift and fixation. The news and views bit on that Cell paper puts it in context: https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30817-5.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30817-5.pdf Another study didn't find an effect on transmission: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108506v4 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108506v4 > The D614G mutation displays only three independent emergences that qualify for inclusion in our analyses. While this limits our power to detect a statistically significant association with transmissibility, the low number of recurrent mutations leading to the D614G allele suggests that, rather than being a driver a of transmission itself, it arose early and went up in frequency by hitchhiking with one of the deepest branches in the global phylogeny as the SARS-CoV-2 population expanded. People are still working on this, and it should become clearer in time.
tialaramex 6y ago
New Zealand is different because it eliminated the virus. By April the infection had been isolated and through May they basically ensured the few people who had it were kept away from everybody else long enough to recover, by June they were finished and getting back to normal. Every new reported infection in New Zealand for the last 70+ days is a person in quarantine or "managed isolation" because they arrived from somewhere it's endemic. Will it leak eventually? Probably, and they're ready for that. [Edited to remove claim that New Zealand is unique when several other countries also eliminated this virus as pointed out by another poster] They hoped Australia could do the same, and then they'd open the border to Australia, but Australia botched it and now has a high rate of new infections.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  Vietnam, Thailand and Taiwan -- none of which have had local transmission in months -- would like to have a word with you. Also, Australia's botching is effectively contained to a single state (Victoria), which is sealed off from the rest of the country.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    New South Wales has elevated case levels. It's not as obviously terrible as Victoria but it's going the wrong direction. I actually didn't know about Vietnam and Thailand, so thanks for that. But again it seems like elimination was a conscious strategy like in New Zealand. So in my opinion strategy is the difference, not some innate biological quirk shared by people across New Zealand and Vietnam but apparently not in parts of Australia.
    - discordance 6y ago
      NSW has received cases from the Victoria bungle. There's little regard for social distancing or shut down measures. We're screwed now. It's just a matter of time.
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  If NZ is because it eliminated the virus, then it will all happen again when (inevitably, in a virus this widespread throughout the world) someone brings it back in.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jhpriestley 6y ago

The virus spread quite well in Wuhan and the South Korean church though. Why do you dismiss the significant policy differences as a sufficient explanation?

adventured 6y ago
It fails to explain why countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia have so few deaths. There are 470 million people between those three Asian nations, and fewer deaths than in Canada (which has done a very sound job against the virus). Indonesia has as many deaths as Sweden, with ~26 times the population. The Philippines has 1,846 deaths vs Brazil which has 82,771. Bangladesh has 2,751 deaths, 30% of what Germany has, despite Bangladesh having nearly twice as many people. The Germans responded in extraordinary fashion to the virus. Bangladesh has so few deaths because their response was vastly superior, better funded, better organized, technologically superior in its testing and tracing? Comeon. The Philippines had an amazing response to the virus compared to Germany or Canada or Brazil or Switzerland? No way. There's definitely more going on there, including an impact from the different climates. It's entirely reasonable that some parts of Asia could have greater immune protection due to past virus exposures.
- pavs 6y ago
  Becausr none of these countriest are telling you corrent mortality number. There are openly fuzzing the numbers and actively suppresing domestic jounalists with laws that protects the government from criticisms. This is atleast true for Bangladesh (where I am from), India, philipines and vietnam. To the best of my knowledge. There is absolutely no reason to believe that something magical is happening in this part of world. People are dying, infection rate extemely high. They are being highly under-reported.
  - L_Rahman 6y ago
    Let's leave Vietnam out of this. They're not hiding their numbers. It's difficult for the rest of the world to admit this, but Vietnam beat the virus because their leadership acted quickly, ruthlessly and over time. In the early days of the outbreak Vietnam didn't have rigorous contact tracing setup, so if a case turned out positive they simply shut down the entire neighborhood for two weeks. Once the source was mostly international cases, they also shut their borders and made no exceptions, not even for trading partners begging to let a handful of people in. But most importantly, even when case numbers went down into single digits, they kept up total lockdown for an additional two weeks. This saved them from making the mistake Korea made in removing social distancing restrictions the day before a major 5 day weekend which seeded the country and we've been squashing spot fires here ever since. Authoritarian regimes that have earned public trust through effective governance are probably the countries best suited to manage a pandemic like this one. It's just there are very few of them so it's hard to think of such countries as a category.
    - rossdavidh 6y ago
      But none of that would matter, given that there are millions of people on the planet who have it, and they will continually get reinfected. Whereas, a previous cold virus that gave some significant portion of them immunity, would matter. Also, South Korea's death numbers (and Vietnam's) both look pretty good compared to any nation in western Europe.
- thevagrant 6y ago

doliveira 6y ago

Do you really find it easier to explain the different impact with genetic differences rather than simply different government policies and cultures? What about it doesn't correlate again?

leafboi 6y ago

I think it's hygiene related. I hypothesize that people living in countries with low hygiene have more exposure to diseases and thus better immunity. Examine India: In India, People throw trash everywhere, defecate everywhere, piss everywhere, wipe their rear ends with their hands, eat with their hands, and also shake other peoples' hands with the same hands... In general, it's well known that India is a pretty low hygienic country. Which may explain this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52435463 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52435463 Basically low hygiene exposes people to more diseases allowing their bodies to develop greater immunity inline with the quotation you mentioned above. There may be a correlation. I just gave some anecdotal data... Maybe some data scientist can find the correlation between two quantitative datasets: quantitative hygiene levels by country and deaths/infections of covid-19 by country.

kasperset 6y ago
One of the contributing factor may also be under reporting of deaths attributed to Covid-19 in these countries.
op03 6y ago
The data is all garbage. Data in India has a long way to travel from village to town to district to state to the national level. At each stage all kind of errors intentional and unintentional enter the system. All these errors keep accumulating as they move up the food chain. By the time it reaches the top (and it takes its sweet time) god knows what it actually means. Just to make things more interesting there is major fudging at the end of the chain to make it fit what was produced by the system over the previous years, cause budgets and all kinds of plans and policies that are based on prior garbage will start imploding otherwise. The interesting thing Covid has done is expose how bad those numbers are because the regional govts for the first time are dutifully releasing Daily Data from the morgues. That data leaks out non-covid deaths, which should more or less match non-covid deaths/mortality rate data reported from prior years. And it doesn't. By large factors. (Google non covid mortality rate for whatever city and compare with historic numbers in the national data portal) Your hypothesis assumes they are all not dying from low hygiene. They probably are, in large numbers, and are just not being counted.

wolco 6y ago

There are two different strains. An older one based in Asia that appears weaker. A newer one found in Italy. This research came out months ago but no one is mentioning this.

crowbahr 6y ago
Was the research peer reviewed? Published in any journals? Rigorous? Documented?
- networkimprov 6y ago
  It was reported in the NYTimes, FWIW.
- noodlenotes 6y ago
  They're referring to a paper published in Cell. "Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus" https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30820-5.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30820-5.pdf There's a more infectious mutation that overtakes the original form wherever it spreads, including Asia, although it's not more severe. I guess Asian countries would have an advantage because they faced the original form first and got their act together, while Europe and the East Coast of the US faced the more infectious variant early on. (The West Coast, on the other hand, started out with the original form, probably because the virus came directly from Asia. The variant didn't even show up in the Bay Area until May, for example.)
  - twic 6y ago
    It's true that the G614 form overtook the D614 form, but that is not necessarily because it's more infectious - it could be drift and fixation. The news and views bit on that Cell paper puts it in context: https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30817-5.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30817-5.pdf Another study didn't find an effect on transmission: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108506v4 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108506v4 > The D614G mutation displays only three independent emergences that qualify for inclusion in our analyses. While this limits our power to detect a statistically significant association with transmissibility, the low number of recurrent mutations leading to the D614G allele suggests that, rather than being a driver a of transmission itself, it arose early and went up in frequency by hitchhiking with one of the deepest branches in the global phylogeny as the SARS-CoV-2 population expanded. People are still working on this, and it should become clearer in time.

tialaramex 6y ago

New Zealand is different because it eliminated the virus. By April the infection had been isolated and through May they basically ensured the few people who had it were kept away from everybody else long enough to recover, by June they were finished and getting back to normal. Every new reported infection in New Zealand for the last 70+ days is a person in quarantine or "managed isolation" because they arrived from somewhere it's endemic. Will it leak eventually? Probably, and they're ready for that. [Edited to remove claim that New Zealand is unique when several other countries also eliminated this virus as pointed out by another poster] They hoped Australia could do the same, and then they'd open the border to Australia, but Australia botched it and now has a high rate of new infections.

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
Vietnam, Thailand and Taiwan -- none of which have had local transmission in months -- would like to have a word with you. Also, Australia's botching is effectively contained to a single state (Victoria), which is sealed off from the rest of the country.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  New South Wales has elevated case levels. It's not as obviously terrible as Victoria but it's going the wrong direction. I actually didn't know about Vietnam and Thailand, so thanks for that. But again it seems like elimination was a conscious strategy like in New Zealand. So in my opinion strategy is the difference, not some innate biological quirk shared by people across New Zealand and Vietnam but apparently not in parts of Australia.
  - discordance 6y ago
    NSW has received cases from the Victoria bungle. There's little regard for social distancing or shut down measures. We're screwed now. It's just a matter of time.
rossdavidh 6y ago
If NZ is because it eliminated the virus, then it will all happen again when (inevitably, in a virus this widespread throughout the world) someone brings it back in.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]