A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Roy
Spencer noted an inverse correlation between malaria and COVID-19 in hundreds of countries:
If I sort all 234 countries by incidence of malaria, and compute the average incidence of malaria and the average incidence of COVID-19, the results are simply amazing: those countries with malaria have virtually no COVID-19 cases, and those countries with many COVID-19 cases have little to no malaria.
Here are the averages for the three country groupings:
Top 40 Malaria countries:
212.24 malaria per thousand = 0.2 COVID-19 cases per million
Next 40 Malaria countries:
7.30 malaria per thousand = 10.1 COVID-19 cases per million
Remaining 154 (non-)Malaria countries:
0.00 malaria per thousand = 68.7 COVID-19 cases per million
One possibility is the impact of widespread use of chloroquine as a long-term preventative for malaria. There are other possibilities, of course, including heat and humidity, but there also is an indication that patient populations being treated with chloroquine are not coming down with COVID-19. At least, I read that during the last week, but it's getting harder and harder to find a search engine that will generate any "chloroquine" results that aren't deeply skeptical and full of spiteful references to the Bad Man, fish-tank cleaner, and the suffering of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients, even while chloroquine manufacturers are dialing up cheap chloroquine production to 11 and donating doses by the tens of millions.
4 comments:
You know, if I had WANTED to prevent idiots from consuming non-medical quinine like fish tank cleaner, I could not have POSSIBLY put out more publicity or instruction or effective behavior modification memes than the headlines in the news of the husband-and-wife idiots.
What's that word for a beneficial conspiracy theory?
Euspiracy?
Spencer's statistics also don't seem to be normalized for mosquito populations and active efforts to suppress those populations--which brings in Zika virus comparisons as interesting, also.
Eric Hines
Yeah, there are a few problems with the theory- questions about testing volume and reporting, lack of travel to those places, the fact that chloroquine is ineffective against a lot of strains of malaria now. But there might be something there in terms of built up resistance due to exposure to similar virii, perhaps another malarial drug has some effectiveness, or some other factor yet unconsidered.
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