With all of the controversy regarding President Trump’s use of the term “China virus” (which he recently discontinued), people have overlooked the extent to which the epidemic has recently gone from being primarily an East Asian problem to a Western problem.
You may have seen graphs showing incidence by country, using circles of varying sizes. But those show cumulative totals, not current incidence. The following graph shows active cases:
East Asia and South Asia combined (Afghanistan to Japan) have roughly 4 billion people, slightly over half the global population. But their active cases are far lower, something closer to 20,000, if I’m not mistaken. The current global total is roughly 460,000. Africa has an even lower caseload than Asia.
[Update: Those numbers were inaccurate. At the time, the global total was more like 340,000. Now (Thursday PM) it’s 382,000. The East/South Asian total was closer to 17,000, and hasn’t changed much.]
It’s true that reported caseloads are biased by a lack of testing in some countries. But if anything, removing that bias makes the West look even worse. Daily totals of death from coronavirus are now in the 2,000 to 3,000 range, whereas deaths each day in East and South Asia add up to just a few dozen. That’s barely 1% of the global total, despite having half the population. And of course the epidemic started in China, and first spread to other East Asian locations such as Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.
It actually makes little difference whether the virus originated in a Chinese bat or an Italian bat, or even a lab somewhere. What matters is the location where people are dying by the thousands. Perhaps President Trump should call it the “Eurovirus”?
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Mar 25 2020 at 6:17pm
Maybe there’s something to the idea that warm weather impedes its spread, since Africa and Latin America are so much less affected. Alternatively, maybe many developing countries with little testing capacity also aren’t very diligent in recording cause of death; it’ll be worth looking if there’s a spike in pneumonia-related deaths in these parts of the world it.
Fun fact: I read at some point that in Arab parts of the world syphilis used to be called “the Frankish disease,” because it believed to be passed there from France. Of course it first came to Europe in Spain from the Americas via Columbus’s expeditions; I decided to do a little internet research and found a source with some other amusing information: the Germans called it ‘the French pox’; the Polish called it as the ‘German sickness’; the Russians called it the ‘Polish sickness’; and the Japanese called it ‘the Canton Rash.’
Scott Sumner
Mar 25 2020 at 6:30pm
Nice story. I guess that’s human nature.
Climate may play a role in South Asia, but I suspect the low death rates in China/Japan/Korea reflect other factors.
Warren Platts
Mar 25 2020 at 7:49pm
Actually, it turns out that, “People with blood group A have a significantly higher risk for acquiring COVID-19 compared with non-A blood groups, whereas blood group O has a significantly lower risk for the infection compared with non-O blood groups.”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.11.20031096v1.full.pdf
And guess where, among populous nations, the highest concentration of type A blood is? Yep. Western Europe, and, to a lesser extent, eastern United States.
BTW as for the proper common name for the virus, it is interesting to note that the Global Times used the term “Wuhan virus” several times in January. Eg:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1177375.shtml
Scott Sumner
Mar 25 2020 at 8:15pm
You said:
“Global Times used the term “Wuhan virus” several times in January.”
Yes, and what was their motive? And what was Trump’s motive?
Kurt Schuler
Mar 25 2020 at 9:11pm
Accuracy. The virus originated in Wuhan, and spread at least in part because officials there and in the central government initially suppressed the news, missing an early opportunity for quarantining sufferers. (Global Times, for unfamiliar readers, is owned by the Chinese Communist Party.)
Mark Z
Mar 26 2020 at 3:46am
I think there’s clearly a more obvious reason than racism (which is what seems to be the favored explanation): the virus likely spread to humans via Chinese live animal markets, which have caused epidemiological problems in the past, and the Chinese government concealed the problem early on, hampering global containment efforts. Repeatedly emphasizing the Chinese origin of the pandemic may be petty, but to insist that where the virus originated is incidental is also, at best, questionable. It isn’t racist to lay some blame on China for its deception or for its failure to deal with its animal markets despite having already had problems like this before, even if one thinks people are laying too much blame, or that it’s pointless to harp on.
TMC
Mar 26 2020 at 8:19am
The motive was to refer to the virus, in the most common way. Ebola, MERS, Spanish Flu, Asian Flu were all named after the region where it started. The complaint that it’s racist is ahistorical. It was a little scary have the media change the naming convention at the snap of the Chinese fingers.
Scott Sumner
Mar 26 2020 at 3:42pm
Kurt, I assure you that “accuracy” has rarely been Trump’s motive for public statements. He tries to win votes by demonizing unpopular groups of people.
China’s government deserves a lot of blame, which I’ve done in this blog. But so does the US government, which has also put out a lot of false propaganda, and also tried to cover up the problem. “China” is a country with 1.4 billion people; the blame should be put on Xi Jinping, and those around him.
Asian-Americans are being beaten up because of all of this nationalist propaganda.
Warren Platts
Mar 27 2020 at 4:06pm
Now that I think about, the motives were probably about the same. At the time of the Global Times headlines (late January) that referred to the “Wuhan virus”, the central CCP government was trying to distance itself from the local authorities in Wuhan and Hubei (who all got fired).
(I hear this is the standard modus operandi within the People’s Republic of China: if anything bad ever happens, it is never because of the central government, it is always the fault of local officials–kind of the opposite of the USA: if anything bad happens, it is always Trump’s fault.)
Thus by calling it the “Wuhan virus” the central CCP government was attempting to deflect blame from themselves, and place it squarely on the local officials in Wuhan.
MarkW
Mar 28 2020 at 4:20pm
I suspect his motive is neither mere ‘accuracy’ nor to demonize particular ethnic groups but to try to prevent Beijing from getting away with the propaganda coup it is apparently trying to pull off (e.g. China did little wrong at the outset apart from some overzealous regional officials and — and maybe the virus didn’t come from China at all — but look at what a great job China did in fighting the virus! So much better than the west!) China’s leaders are trying to put themselves in a position to claim that the pandemic was extinguished domestically and that any new flareup must be the result of reintroduction by foreign travelers (and it is clamping down on potential information sources that might contradict this narrative — e.g. with the expulsion of American reporters even though they work for anti-Trump outlets). Also, I suspect, that Trump is maintain the visibility of his travel ban and be able to point to early claims by the opposition that his ban was racist. I really don’t think Trump was being merely factual — his motivation was surely political — but I also don’t think he was trying to create animus against Asians or Asian-Americans.
Mark Z
Mar 28 2020 at 6:10pm
““China” is a country with 1.4 billion people; the blame should be put on Xi Jinping, and those around him.”
Referring to countries and their governments (or leaders) interchangeably is something pretty much everyone does. It’s commonplace even to refer to “the Germans” or “the French” when referring to just diplomatic envoys from countries. Nobody says ‘Khmer Rouge genocide’ or ‘Pol Pot genocide,’ they say ‘Cambodian genocide.’ Certainly in an in depth discussion on moral philosophy I would certainly hope people would lay the blame more precisely, but no one is ever expected to be remotely ;rhetorically individualistic; in describing things that national governments do. I’m pretty certain many of your posts fail to go out of the way to make, say, a crisp distinction between “America” and the Trump administration. Why suddenly decide this is the standard here and now?
Aleksander
Mar 25 2020 at 9:07pm
There are already 22 reported deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa, currently increasing at about 5/day. The virus just arrived a little later in Africa. Now it’s spreading, and they won’t have any European-style lockdowns to stop it.
Scott Sumner
Mar 26 2020 at 3:42pm
That’s consistent with what I said.
Yaakov
Mar 25 2020 at 7:20pm
Putting Japan aside, the disease is clearly a disease of rich countries, where people can live to an old age although their health is deteriorating. In the third world, people who would die from coronovirus have already died years ago.
Scott Sumner
Mar 25 2020 at 8:16pm
Yaakov, Many East Asian countries are rich.
Matthias Goergens
Mar 26 2020 at 1:36am
Yes, though perhaps not very old yet? Japan is the obvious exception, but they are special in other ways.
Scott Sumner
Mar 26 2020 at 3:43pm
No, demographics cannot come close to explaining the differences. They all tend to have extremely low birth rates.
Aleksander
Mar 25 2020 at 9:13pm
It’s still uncertain how much more important age is for morbidity, than having a pre-existing condition (especially lung-related). And people in rich countries tend to be fairly healthy (that’s why they grow old in the first place). So what will happen when malnourished villages in Africa catches this? I don’t think anybody knows.
Scott Sumner
Mar 26 2020 at 3:45pm
In many African countries only 2% to 3% are over age 65. That might help a bit. But they also have severe health problems, as you say.
Aleksander
Mar 27 2020 at 4:00am
I looked up two the age structure of two countries (Zimbabwe and one other) the other day, and both had about 4-5% +65. But yeah, this should provide downwards pressure on CFR. Zimbabwe’s only (official) death so far was a 30-year-old journalist.
Brian Donohue
Mar 25 2020 at 8:04pm
Rich country flu?
Actually, the origin is important. If this came out of a US lab or cultural practice, we’d be hearing about it, and rightly so.
Scott Sumner
Mar 25 2020 at 8:18pm
It matters if it came out of a lab, not sure it it matters (as much) where the lab was located. Ditto for cultural practices.
Matthias Goergens
Mar 26 2020 at 1:38am
If you want to talk about ‘mattering’, we need to talk about ‘mattering for what?’
For fighting against the disease as it is, the origin doesn’t matter much.
If you want to point ideological fingers, it might matter. Depending on your ideology.
nobody.really
Mar 26 2020 at 10:27am
Exactly right. At this point, we can predict that the virus can’t keep going much longer. After all, it was made in China.
[Ducking!]
Lorenzo from Oz
Mar 26 2020 at 3:09am
Western and East Asian countries are the oldest countries and the most connected countries. East Asia had SARS as a test run and learnt from that. The Eurosphere democracies did not.
All the Western/Eurosphere democracies seem to be performing about as bad as each other in response to the pandemic.
Italy has several points of similarity with China:
(1) Older population with aged people living with family.
(2) Smoke like chimneys.
(3) Live near lots of smoking chimneys.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935116300834?fbclid=IwAR0UOQ69Q37x1S8IK3OhJtVb773ukm1d6hvWgmCGOSXXSY8nvbZ1p10eiHs
Shane L
Mar 26 2020 at 6:32am
Here is a world map showing* all air flights ongoing at this moment:
https://www.flightradar24.com/13.86,6.35/2
When I look at it now, it shows a major concentration of flights around Europe, North America and East Asia. This makes me think that the disease prevalence in some part simply reflects those regions of the world that involve the most international movement of people. Africa and Latin America, for example, have much less air traffic.
*I’m not sure if this website is accurate, however!
Alan Goldhammer
Mar 26 2020 at 9:56am
I’ve heard from photographers in South Africa that cases of SARS-CoV-2 are ramping up there across all ethnic lines.
A lot of developing countries do not have good public health reporting making it hard to ascertain what the viral outbreak levels are.
JK Brown
Mar 26 2020 at 11:53am
I take you haven’t notice that for at least this week President Trump as specifically not used “Chinese virus”. He just calls it “virus”. No doubt because he achieved his goal of starting the chattering class to chattering and that volume repelled the Chinese government’s attempts to blame the U.S. Army, along with other smears. Sure you can lodge a formal complaint and the Sec. of State did. But in this age of media on the internet, simply provoke the chatters to do the work for you. A corollary to Cunningham’s law.
The interesting note is why the very official policy by the WHO not to use the taxonomic name SAR-CoV-2. They feared that “SARS” would alarm Asian populations, at least according to their press release. Far more catchy to just call it SARS 2.0.
Scott Sumner
Mar 26 2020 at 4:42pm
The first line of my post was:
“With all of the controversy regarding President Trump’s use of the term “China virus” (which he recently discontinued)”
And you respond:
“I take you haven’t notice that for at least this week President Trump as specifically not used “Chinese virus”.”
Sigh . . .
Laura
Mar 26 2020 at 11:53am
Scott,
It is a well established convention to name viruses by their source. Identifying the virus as BetaCov-Wuhan-04 is the scientific name of the sequenced genome. The general name being SARS-Cov-2. Neither name is acceptable to China which has been fighting a campaign of intimidation to force use of COVID-19 instead of SARS and nCov-2019 instead of Wuhan Coronavirus.
They have forced the WHO to use the wrong naming in their press statements and have expelled journalists who use a different name, and pushed the scurrilous framing that identifying viruses by their origin is racist.
Viral outbreaks are often called by a name denoting their place of origin.
zeke5123
Mar 26 2020 at 12:17pm
What was the point of this post? I am honestly perplexed. There is an interesting argument about why countries that are mostly white (e.g., temperature, blood type, social customs, etc.).
But the post seemed to be written to criticize calling the virus the China virus? Why? Further, why is that a problem (i.e., the virus originated from China best we can tell).
Mark Barbieri
Mar 26 2020 at 2:36pm
I just hope that it wipes out the ridiculous practice of shaking hands. Bowing makes much more sense.
Scott Sumner
Mar 27 2020 at 1:57pm
To his credit, Trump recommended we stop shaking hands, even after this is over.
Scott Sumner
Mar 26 2020 at 4:43pm
Laura, Yes, I know all that. See my replies above.
MikeDC
Mar 26 2020 at 6:50pm
I don’t see how there’s anything to be learned from speculating about countries that cant and don’t test or report this information.
Joseph Hertzlinger
Mar 27 2020 at 12:19am
So… ESR had it backwards? http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8566
Scott Sumner
Mar 27 2020 at 1:58pm
That post hasn’t held up very well!
Miraç
Mar 28 2020 at 10:59am
Not necessarily,
Iran had one of the worst outbreaks, and we won’t be able to know the exact number of cases since the government still thinks the Virus was American/Israeli made !! Dispute the numbers of cases and death in those countries.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/19/iran-irgc-coronavirus-propaganda-blames-america-israel/
Furthermore, outbreaks in Iran spilled over to the Arab state of the Gulf Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey.
Gulf countries introduced very restricted measures early on (three weeks ago); travel restriction, no mosques prayers, school, university closure, and just a week ago, Saudi Arabia imposed a nationwide curfew (18 hours a day). Even the holy sites of Makkah and Madia closed three weeks ago.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global-health/485934-saudi-arabia-bans-all-pilgrimages-to-mecca-to-fight
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-saudi/saudi-imposes-curfew-to-curb-coronavirus-spread-uae-suspends-passengers-flights-idUSKBN21917Z
Those countries were somewhat successful; as of March 26th, the number of new cases reported started to flatten and decreased for the first time yesterday ( 1 death reported in Saudi Arabia and around 1200 cases).
Meanwhile, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, and Isreal are now fighting to contain the outbreak.
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