The Chairman of Tokyo’s Medical Association made a public statement to announce his support for ivermectin use for all Covid patients. But you probably didn’t read that in any mainstream media outlet, did you.
At least the gentleman didn’t get in trouble for supporting ivermectin, which is more than could be said for Maui’s District Health Officer, as this article delightedly reports.
Here’s a way to immediately tell if an article is fairly covering the ivermectin issue or not. If it refers to the Nobel prize winning medicine, on the WHO list of essential medicines, and safely used by millions if not billions of people world-wide for decades for a number of ailments, as “the veterinary dewormer” then you know you’d dealing with a dishonest biased hit piece – and if you’d like an example of such a piece, the immediately prior linked article is one such example.
Current Numbers
French Polynesia moved up one in the minor country list, with Georgia displacing Aruba for the bottom listing.
The UK moved up one place in the major country list, with Brazil falling one.
No changes in the death list, although Mexico’s massive growth continues, suggesting it may overtake Poland within the next week, and the US might also do the same.
The final table, on last week’s most active countries, showed generally lower numbers. Israel, one of the world’s most vaccinated countries, is also now the world’s second most active country for new Covid cases. The UK rose two places, and the US rose three places.
In Europe, Hungary had its cases rise 99%, Norway had an 89% increase, Germany had another 34% rise in the last week, and Austria was up 21%. At the other end of the scale, Spain had a 40% drop and France a 17% drop. Europe as a whole saw a slight 1% drop in cases.
Canada’s cases continue to increase, this week with a 25% lift, and Mexico had an 11% drop. The world as a whole had a 4% drop in cases.
I am curious how it is that the seemingly unstoppable Delta variant, which has seen US cases rise to a level 12 times that of a couple of months ago, and UK cases rise over three months to a rate nearly 20 times higher, has been so “gentle” on the world as a whole. As you can see, world cases have not even doubled during the same time frame, and if we were to take out the effect of the now 185k cases/day in the US and UK alone, the rise would be even more gentle.
This is another one of the many counter-intuitive puzzles about the virus. Why is it currently disproportionately affecting the US and UK?
Top Case Rates Minor (population under 10 million) Countries (cases per million)
| Rank | One Week Ago | Today |
| 1 | Seychelles (195,778) | Seychelles (199,661) |
| 2 | Andorra (193,628) | Andorra |
| 3 | Montenegro | Montenegro |
| 4 | Gibraltar (156,977) | Gibraltar (158,496) |
| 5 | San Marino | San Marino |
| 6 | Bahrain | Bahrain |
| 7 | St Barth | St Barth |
| 8 | Maldives | Maldives |
| 9 | Aruba | French Polynesia |
| 10 | French Polynesia (128,633) | Georgia (136,452) |
Top Case Rates Major (population over 10 million) Countries (cases per million)
| Rank | One Week Ago | Today |
| 1 | Czech Republic (156,315) | Czech Republic (156,435) |
| 2 | USA (115,677) | USA (119,026) |
| 3 | Argentina (112,416) | Argentina |
| 4 | Netherlands | Netherlands |
| 5 | Sweden | Sweden |
| 6 | Spain | Spain |
| 7 | France | France |
| 8 | Portugal | Portugal |
| 9 | Belgium | Belgium |
| 10 | Brazil | UK (98,558) |
| 11 | UK (95,075) | Brazil (96,784) |
| 12 | Colombia (94,942) | Colombia (95,228) |
Top Death Rate Major Countries (deaths per million)
| Rank | One Week Ago | Today |
| 1 | Peru (5,906) | Peru (5,915) |
| 2 | Czech Republic (2,831) | Czech Republic (2,833) |
| 3 | Brazil | Brazil |
| 4 | Argentina | Argentina |
| 5 | Colombia | Colombia |
| 6 | Belgium | Belgium |
| 7 | Italy | Italy |
| 8 | Poland (1,993) | Poland (1,993) |
| 9 | Mexico (1,940) | Mexico (1,978) |
| 10 | USA (1,936) | USA (1,965) |
Top Rates in New Cases Reported in the Last Week (new cases per million) for Countries over one million population
| Rank | One Week Ago | Today |
| 1 | Georgia 8,332 | Georgia 7,129 |
| 2 | Cuba 5,798 | Israel 6,262 |
| 3 | Israel | Cuba |
| 4 | Malaysia | Malaysia |
| 5 | Botswana | Mongolia |
| 6 | Eswatini | UK 3,499 |
| 7 | Mongolia | USA 3,210 (est) |
| 8 | UK 3,309 | North Macedonia |
| 9 | North Macedonia | Botswana |
| 10 | USA 3,000 (est) | Iran |
| 11 | Iran | Azerbaijan |
| 12 | Kazakhstan 2,609 | Ireland 2,530 |
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Items below include yet another encouraging low-cost Covid treatment using an off-the-shelf medicine, even if you can persuade a doctor to prescribe you ivermectin, you might not then be able to persuade a pharmacist to dispense it, yet another new Covid variant, and a surprising contributing factor to the rise of more and more variants, is it right to focus primarily on mask wearing to control our present outbreak, a look at vaccination rates, Covid lessons from an elementary school, have Denmark and the UK beaten the virus, yet another surprising shortage, is the science changing (or was it wrong), the CDC chooses to anoint a new “disease crisis”, and New Zealand holds a surprising anti-lockdown protest.
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An interesting observation, using mask wearing as a proxy for overall safe practices (e.g., social distancing (including not filling football (both types) stadiums to 100%), hand washing, etc.), many of the worse case growth is countries with lower mask wearing.
Israel was in the range of 80-90% early in the year; dropped to14% in June and is now back to 50%.
The world average is 60%. The US and UK are about 33%.
France and Germany have a down trend but currently France is at 50% and Germany 39% (France slightly down in cases and Germany is up)
With the delta variant it seems to be all too common for a vaccinated person to have a mild case and be contagious for a short while until the immune system kicks in and eliminates the virus.
Even in Israel there is 30% not vaccinated. So lots of people to catch Covid and get sick.
As to the US and UK. Being at 2/3rds of the world average and a virus the spreads exponentially could explain why they rates are so high.
Also a contributing factor is the level of travel between India and the US (and I suspect the UK). It seems that anyone with dual citizenship can still travel (which is why a check look at United’s Delhi to Newark flights are all 80+% full this week)
Hi – can you provide a source for your mask wearing data? Note also the data I’ve provided, sourced from ourworldindata and ihme, about a broader range of social distancing/mask wearing measurements.