Saturday, October 30, 2021

Covid-Safe Country Index (Update 27 Oct 2021)

Basis: The conditional probability of the chance of contracting Covid-19 and dying from the infection. (Percentage of cases to population X percentage of death to number of cases).

Observations of 27 Oct since the last index dated 5 Sep:

1. Singapore dropped like a bomb by 100% from from 24th safest position to 50th. This is not a surprise as hospital beds are taken up and countries restricted movements to and from our shores.

2. The 3 countries that have taken to Ivermectin recently and which I tracked, have improved their rankings. These are Indonesia from 119 to 110, India from 105 to 95 and Japan from 80-70.

3. The African APOC states are the countries in Africa that took part in the African Programem for Onchocerciasis Control (1995 to 2010) in which Ivermectin was used against parasitic diseases. These states all appear in upper 1/3rd of the index. Several other African states, although not in the programme, also appear to do well in the index, possibly due to the same fact Ivermectin is widely used. (APOC countries in the index are those in yellow-coloured cells). Also worth noting African states mostly use Sinovac or Sinopharm, by way of Chinese aid.

4. There have also been similar programmes of using Ivermectin against parasitic diseases in some countries in Latin America. However, the experience in these countries have not been the same as the APOC countries with regards to covid status. Latin American countries are not faring well. I can't sight any studies as to the reasons why. It would be interesting to know the causation.

5. Tanzania has dropped as the number one safest country (ignoring the island states) to 22nd. It could well be they are getting their reporting more up to date. Burundi is now the safest and China is still number two.

6. Ignore the changes in status of the small island states. Due to the small population, a slight change in numbers can appear significant.

7. The caveat to the report is the integrity of data is questionable. Some countries fudge the data discreetly in order to drive the vaccination narrative. For example, covid events are reported under respective comorbidities, or less tests means less cases reported.

8. Of the countries (ignoring the small island states) which have achieved more than 60% fully vaccinated, 18 of them lie in the bottom 1/3rd of the table. and 10 are in the top 1/3rd. This seems to support the observation that the higher the vaccination rate, the higher the cases.

9. Check out the report and judge for yourself whether the observation that countries with low vaccination has lower probabilities of dying from covid bears some credence. Note that many African states have poor data reporting, but their vaccination progress is lagging far behind the rest of the world.

Click here to view PDF file (it's easier to see)


I have managed to embed the spreadsheet file here. But I'm still unable to make the external file responsive to fit the iframe. So unfortunately, the horizontal scroll is needed.



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