Japan has an order of magnitude lower obesity, surprised that isn’t mentioned in the article. If you are exposed to the virus and are obese you are far more likely to experience covid.
Can you please stop posting unsubstantive/flamebait comments like this to HN, and also, can you please stop posting primarily for ideological battle? Your account has become close to a single-purpose account (arguing about one thing) which is not allowed on HN—it goes against the intended spirit of this place, which is curious conversation on unpredictable things.
I don’t think so. High viral loads lead to more spread, right?
So if people have less comorbidities and that contributes to both less spread and less severe infections it should reduce contagion. Or I suppose contagion is still occurring but isn’t detected because the infections are subclinical and the host never even tests.
If you catch covid but don't feel it, then you'll go back to normal without ever testing and thus ever knowing you had it.
If this happens for many people in a country (because of whatever reason) then you could easily have 50-100x the recorded numbers but nobody would ever feel it.
While I do think this lowers severity in general, isn't the mentioned SK similarly good in that respect? Why did Japan have previous waves but not this one?
What Japan lacks in overweight population, they make up in an elderly population that's larger than most countries, so I'm skeptical this is enough to explain the massive discrepancy.
Has anyone performed a study to look at 25-hydroxy levels in the elderly in each nation? I suspect that is where I would find a difference. Or better, have we tested for 1α-hydroxylase to factor in renal function? Obesity is a large contributing factor in the routing and storage of both.
India has a significantly lower obesity rate than Japan and a much higher death rate. It is human nature to try and rationalize a tragedy (eg ‘obese people should just lose weight’), but in reality there are many complex factors at play in each country.
I am unable to verify your claim. What I've seen is that Japan has about the same rate of overweight, obesity, morbid obesity and type 2 diabetes. Is it possible that you compared a figure that combines multiple categories to a figure that just looks at a single figure? For example combining type 1 and type 2 diabetes would be misleading, as type 1 diabetes is caused by fundamentally different factors than type 2 diabetes. Also did you ensure that you are comparing data for the same or similar year?
But that source contradicts OP. OP claims that India's obesity rate is significantly lower than Japan's, while your source shows them as being about equal.
Is it OP's position that an obesity rate of 3.9% is significantly lower than a rate of 4.3%?
>Is it OP's position that an obesity rate of 3.9% is significantly lower than a rate of 4.3%?
Yes, in my opinion a 10% difference is significant. The source in no way contradicts that. If you believe 10% is not significant, that's just your opinion as well.
I was watching how India was dealing with Covid early on and one observation that popped out at me was how culturally people handle the deceased. Not to be insensitive, but I saw a lot of outdoor burning of bodies. This produces a lot of smoke. Smoke causes inflammation in the lungs. The downstream effects of Covid can be highly exacerbated by lung inflammation. Maybe this is not the differential factor but as I understand it, India already has a serious pollution problem at least in the industrial areas. Are there parts of India where the air is free of pollution that stats are also gathered from?
Why are we comparing the number of deaths in a first world country (Japan) vs a third world country (India). Isn’t it obvious that poorer countries would have higher death rates? Is it really so complex?
Somehow I get the feeling that what was intended was "A shadowy global cabal is trying to steal freedom from America and is suppressing reports in Japan," but I do agree Occam's Razor applies and yields the result "People in Japan wear masks in public and have been used to wearing masks in public for years every flu season and don't whine about it."
But why would one single country tamper with their own reports - that is, what would motivate Japan, more than other countries, to tamper with their reports?
Like I see the argument for why all countries would want to make themselves look good. (It's weak, because if people start dying in ways they're not tracking they have bigger problems, but I can see the argument that the motivation exists.) And I can perhaps see the argument that the more autocratic a country is, the more likely they are to do so. But none of that explains the observation "Japan is reporting a low number of covid cases compared to other similar countries" - and especially not "Japan is reporting a sudden drop in covid cases compared to other similar countries." You need to multiply a lot more entities to get there.
They actually started certifying venues for air exchange rate early on in the pandemic, there's hand sanitizer pretty much at every shop, everyone wears a mask, plexi panels and other barriers are common, people get told to check their body temperature and not attend events if >37.5, many places actually have thermal cameras or other measurement devices at the entrance, etc.
Add the vaccination rate to all that and it's not hard to see how the R number dropped to <1 (and stayed there). Though we may be rebounding slightly in the last few days, so we'll see whether it's the start of a new wave or not. Whether we get a significant year end wave like we did last year will tell the story.
> certifying venues for air exchange rate early on in the pandemic
The wisdom of this as a public investment in health seems so obvious that I keep wondering why there's been no similar progress discernible here in the States, followed up with tighter HVAC requirements in building codes.
Please people, don't downvote this. We all know ivermectin has been "debunked" a lot of time, and yet others people keep reporting that "it works". And among those people a lot of them will indeed point out a few videos from japan (and other times india) with "doctors" (don't know who they are) advocating for ivermerctin.
So yes, it would be a very interesting data point to know for sure what's the real situation there regarding treatments like ivermectin.
>it would be a very interesting data point to know for sure what's the real situation there regarding treatments like ivermectin.
The efficacy of ivermectin is a proxy war for something that has zero to do with treating a disease. As such, by the time you find a satisfyingly-conclusive answer, you won't actually care anymore.
Clearly there are a lot of doctors that have good experiences with ivermectin. On an FDA approved dosage, it is one of the safest drugs available. Yet there seems to be a crusade against it. It is beyond me why such cheap and safe drug that has helped many, especially in the early stages of a covid19 infection, is being so strongly censored. In the Netherlands, we advise those coming down with covid19 to wait until things get so bad one needs to go to the hospital. Why not try ivermectin at this stage.
It has been tried. There are still ongoing trials. The evidence so far points to ivermectin being beneficial for people with parasites suppressing their immune systems. Studies in areas without common parasitic infections tend to show no effect.
Basically we have better treatments both in-hospital (remdesivir), and out (monoclonal antibodies, new Pfizer pill soon). Nevermind prevention of serious symptoms with vaccine is our best tool.
I don't know what's true or not - one side insists on it, while large scale trials seem to be ongoiong, some have failed, some trials appear to have been fraudulent. Yet some people, including some physicians, seem to insist on it so I'd like to know what's going on. But it's difficult through the fog of misinfo.
That rumor seems to have originated with a right-wing American broadcaster, but more importantly, ivermectin isn't approved for use as a Covid treatment in Japan:
> Yet another theory, she adds, holds that the delta variant in Japan has mutated so that it has lost the ability to replicate, pushing itself toward extinction.
How does that work? A single mutation that decreases transmissivity (anywhere between 0-100%) presumably loses out to the regular variant. So did any such mutation develop spontaneously in many viruses? Can't see how that could happen.
Does anyone know what reporting practices are like in Japan? I'm definitely not meaning to cast aspersions but I remember early in the pandemic there were concerns cases were being underreported, in part due to issues related to the Olympics. The Olympics have passed but was there truth to any of it and if so is it still an issue?
> The vaccine is one barrier keeping the virus at bay. Oka says that it's a social norm in Japan to keep another kind of barrier over people's mouths and noses.
> "Even though I keep having no COVID patients, I haven't seen anybody on the street in Japan not wearing masks," observers Oka. "Even though they think it may not be necessary, there is pressure for people to do the same as everyone else."
This is probably not sufficient, as the article points out South Korea has much the same culture. But it seems definitely necessary.
Anecdote here. I live in Nigeria, what you'll call a third-world country, and our Covid journey has been funny.
We basically took much precautions earlier in the pandemic but later on reverted to life as usual. Markets, restaurants, offices, et al are wide open and people are going about their lives pre-pandemic, however our Covid rates are relatively low; barely 3,000 deaths from a population of 200 million+ if we're to believe the data from our health agency [1].
More so, we're only about 2% vaccinated [2] (I'm included in this group), but with that quite dire rate, I don't really observe a gloomy pandemic around us. I honestly can't point to anyone in my social circles who died of Covid, but there are a few infections whom all recovered quickly.
I'm still trying to understand why, because my common sense expects that Covid should be dealing with us due to our very low vaccination rate. Are the numbers forged? Are we just ignoring the misery around us? I can't tell but I'm hoping for a scientific explanation. Perhaps, if there's an expert immunologist around here should please give me an opinion, I'm all ears and asking in good faith.
It's not just Japan, we've seen this pattern in various countries in many phases of the pandemic, like the Delta wave in spring India and the recent Omicron wave in South Africa which seems to have peaked. For some reason, we see waves that appear to crash and recede long before the majority of the population is no longer succeptible (either through vaccination or infection).
I believe the reason(s) are still largely unknown. There are multiple plausible explanatory factors, but nothing be really validated. And especially structural explanations (local age distribution, underlying comobidities, population genetics) seem inadequate to account for the huge time variation in cases/deaths. To the point, nobody can confidently predict if Japan, India or South Africa won't have another huge wave 3 or 6 months from now.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadIf you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
So if people have less comorbidities and that contributes to both less spread and less severe infections it should reduce contagion. Or I suppose contagion is still occurring but isn’t detected because the infections are subclinical and the host never even tests.
If you catch covid but don't feel it, then you'll go back to normal without ever testing and thus ever knowing you had it.
If this happens for many people in a country (because of whatever reason) then you could easily have 50-100x the recorded numbers but nobody would ever feel it.
India has a lower rate of diabetes than Japan does, and a lower rate than the global average [0]
India has a large population of diabetics, but that’s due to their massive population size overall.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes_in_India
CIA world factbook measure Indias obesity rate to be lower than japan’s, though the data is from 2016:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r...
Is it OP's position that an obesity rate of 3.9% is significantly lower than a rate of 4.3%?
OP seems to have overstated their claim.
Yes, in my opinion a 10% difference is significant. The source in no way contradicts that. If you believe 10% is not significant, that's just your opinion as well.
Perhaps occam's razor applies.
Which means what exactly within this context?
Like I see the argument for why all countries would want to make themselves look good. (It's weak, because if people start dying in ways they're not tracking they have bigger problems, but I can see the argument that the motivation exists.) And I can perhaps see the argument that the more autocratic a country is, the more likely they are to do so. But none of that explains the observation "Japan is reporting a low number of covid cases compared to other similar countries" - and especially not "Japan is reporting a sudden drop in covid cases compared to other similar countries." You need to multiply a lot more entities to get there.
Add the vaccination rate to all that and it's not hard to see how the R number dropped to <1 (and stayed there). Though we may be rebounding slightly in the last few days, so we'll see whether it's the start of a new wave or not. Whether we get a significant year end wave like we did last year will tell the story.
The wisdom of this as a public investment in health seems so obvious that I keep wondering why there's been no similar progress discernible here in the States, followed up with tighter HVAC requirements in building codes.
So yes, it would be a very interesting data point to know for sure what's the real situation there regarding treatments like ivermectin.
The efficacy of ivermectin is a proxy war for something that has zero to do with treating a disease. As such, by the time you find a satisfyingly-conclusive answer, you won't actually care anymore.
Basically we have better treatments both in-hospital (remdesivir), and out (monoclonal antibodies, new Pfizer pill soon). Nevermind prevention of serious symptoms with vaccine is our best tool.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34331674/ 2021 July. Seems like a reasonable treatment by these measures.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2021/11/coronavirus-fac...
How does that work? A single mutation that decreases transmissivity (anywhere between 0-100%) presumably loses out to the regular variant. So did any such mutation develop spontaneously in many viruses? Can't see how that could happen.
> "Even though I keep having no COVID patients, I haven't seen anybody on the street in Japan not wearing masks," observers Oka. "Even though they think it may not be necessary, there is pressure for people to do the same as everyone else."
This is probably not sufficient, as the article points out South Korea has much the same culture. But it seems definitely necessary.
We basically took much precautions earlier in the pandemic but later on reverted to life as usual. Markets, restaurants, offices, et al are wide open and people are going about their lives pre-pandemic, however our Covid rates are relatively low; barely 3,000 deaths from a population of 200 million+ if we're to believe the data from our health agency [1].
More so, we're only about 2% vaccinated [2] (I'm included in this group), but with that quite dire rate, I don't really observe a gloomy pandemic around us. I honestly can't point to anyone in my social circles who died of Covid, but there are a few infections whom all recovered quickly.
I'm still trying to understand why, because my common sense expects that Covid should be dealing with us due to our very low vaccination rate. Are the numbers forged? Are we just ignoring the misery around us? I can't tell but I'm hoping for a scientific explanation. Perhaps, if there's an expert immunologist around here should please give me an opinion, I'm all ears and asking in good faith.
1- https://covid19.ncdc.gov.ng/
2 - https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=OWID_W...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3
(I'm interested in this, as I had severe covid with no prior health problems, but do have these N genes).
I believe the reason(s) are still largely unknown. There are multiple plausible explanatory factors, but nothing be really validated. And especially structural explanations (local age distribution, underlying comobidities, population genetics) seem inadequate to account for the huge time variation in cases/deaths. To the point, nobody can confidently predict if Japan, India or South Africa won't have another huge wave 3 or 6 months from now.