PLAGUE JOURNAL May 2020: The Media Miss the Climate Connection: Indonesia, Malaysia, Africa, Yemen
Re-opening: overlooking the obvious in favor of a preferred story.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Innumeracy and Ideology in the Media
I’d been wondering all along why people missed the climate and weather connection in favor of governors and proximity, but I got a good clue recently when I stumbled across a piece of clickbait from the New York Times called “The Covid-19 Riddle: Why Does the Virus Wallop Some Places and Spare Others?” I knew before reading a word of it that the story would contain no information. The media’s commitment to the policy-and-obedience explanation would prevent them from seeing the patterns.
The article, from May 3rd, engages in the typical coffee-shop musing, offering puzzling disparities, for example, “In Indonesia, thousands are believed to have died of the coronavirus. In nearby Malaysia, a strict lockdown has kept fatalities to about 100.” We can already see the logical errors. If Malaysia’s lower case count was the result of their strict lockdown, where’s the riddle? You’ve already arrived at your answer, so why write an article pretending the disparities are a mystery?
The focus on countries, whose boundaries are drawn by politics, not nature, further blinds them. And the misunderstanding of simple math makes the story meaningless even if you buy the riddle premise. Indonesia’s population is nearly nine times larger than Malaysia’s, so any comparison of raw numbers between the two countries is pointless. To the New York Times, populous countries are dangerous—after all, they have more cases. Dangerous countries must have been insufficiently strict. By their logic, all small countries must have acted swiftly and wisely—even though the highest fatality rates in the world are found in small countries. We condemn Russia, Brazil, and the U.S., with their populist strongmen leaders and we praise New Zealand, Germany, and Iceland with their courageous left-leaning leaders. The Times and CNN and the whole lot of them don’t seem to notice that, in their reporting, only large countries with huge populations are hit by the coronavirus.
Indonesia has a population of 268 million people. If it is true that “thousands” have died, that makes Indonesia among the safest places on Earth. With a fatality rate of just 4 per million (as of mid-May), Indonesia was not “in the throes of a growing pandemic.” Nearby Malaysia, which the authors present as a puzzling counterpart to Indonesia, has a nearly identical fatality rate, of 3 per million. The reporters don’t understand that the same fatality rate in a population nearly 10 times larger than another will produce a body count that is nearly 10 times higher. Their comparison of the thousands of Indonesians who are “thought to have died” to “about 100” Malaysians who have died contains breezy exaggerations on both ends, but the numbers are roughly correct. There is no riddle, only obfuscation and innumeracy.
Indonesia and Malaysia have nearly identical weather. The lowest temperature in Jakarta, Indonesia in February and March was 72 degrees, and daily highs were in the upper 80s and 90s. Temperatures in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s largest city, were a few degrees warmer, never falling below 74, with highs closer to 100.
The article attempts to build suspense as the authors consider false riddles: “Global metropolises like New York, Paris and London have been devastated, while teeming cities like Bangkok, Baghdad, New Delhi and Lagos have, so far, largely been spared.” My first thought seeing a list like this is climate. New York, Paris, and London are cold and gray in the winter. Bangkok, Baghdad, New Delhi, and Lagos are hot and dry or hot and wet. But the four-person team that wrote the article couldn’t see it and perhaps the Times couldn’t spring for a map.
I was surprised to see weather come up at all in the article, but it was quickly dismissed: “Many developing nations with hot climates and young populations have escaped the worst, suggesting that temperature and demographics could be factors. But countries like Peru, Indonesia and Brazil, tropical countries in the throes of growing epidemics, throw cold water on that idea.” Very clever.
So that’s why no one in the press notices: they don’t understand math or climate. Or they simply haven’t looked at coronavirus data. They are more interested in writing scare headlines.
Brazil has a vastly larger population than any other country in Central or South America. At the time of the article, Brazil had a low fatality rate, but the authors didn’t know it because they would have looked only at maps put out by the Times, which show total case counts (in the default view), not per capita cases or fatalities. Considering case counts without regard to population size is like suggesting the risk of sunburn is higher on Earth than on Mars because Earthlings have more sunburns than Martians do.
Brazil has nearly 210 million people. The authors thought it had a “growing epidemic” but it didn’t. Or perhaps they just wanted us to think Brazil had a growing epidemic, because of its populist strongman leader. In mid-May, Brazil’s fatality rate was 72 per million, compared with around 500 per million in many countries in northern Europe.
Brazil almost certainly would see a growing pandemic though. Brazil is in the Southern Hemisphere. It spans 2,700 miles from north to south, and the earliest hard-hit areas were the sparsely populated areas of rainforest in the north—under gray skies but without the cool temperatures of Europe or New York. Peru also runs north to south, and also has more cases in the rainy north. As we move toward their winter, we can predict that cases will grow as temperatures in the summer hemisphere cool.
All the countries near Indonesia and Malaysia in the Southern Hemisphere all have essentially the same fatality rates as of mid-May. Malaysia has three fatalities per million. Indonesia has four per million, as do nearby Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. All five countries have been hot and sunny since the virus emerged. Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, farther from the equator, will see a change in their weather as winter approaches. All three have an oceanic climate along stretches of their respective southeastern coasts (in the Southern Hemisphere, trade winds blow from the east, not from the west as they do in Europe), which means we can predict not only that these countries will see increases in coronavirus rates and fatalities by June and July; we can predict which regions within these countries will be hit. Malaysia and Indonesia, on the other hand, will remain tropical all year: hot, wet, and safe.
Africa Handles the Coronavirus
I began looking up climate and weather information around the world on May 14th after I heard someone on a podcast say that we couldn’t figure out why (among other things) Iran was hit and Iraq was spared. (In retrospect, his comment may have been the last time I heard anyone near the mainstream media admit that there was anything we couldn't explain.) My instinct was to look for an explanation. To the mainstream press, every disparity of outcome, no matter how glaring, would be attributed to a difference in behavior, no matter how implausible.
As if to goad me, the very next day, May 15th, I received my daily New Yorker email digest of stories, which featured the comical headline, “What African Nations are Teaching the West about Fighting the Coronavirus.” The article, by Jina Moore, contained a sub-head that read, “From the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, many countries in Africa pursued public-health measures more aggressively than the U.S. and Europe did.” I didn’t read the article, partly on principle (clearly it was nonsense) but also because it is impossible to read everything in the deluge of policy-and-obedience advocacy, which formed the bulk of all incoming news. I trust that countries took measures, and that some were strict and some were lax, but the idea that all outcomes are explained by these measures is ridiculous.
African nations are not generally models of governmental responsibility or public health and safety, suffering many of the world’s worst rates for poverty, life expectancy, crime, violent death, civil war, and social instability. Many people in African nations hold superstitions, for example that AIDS is cured by having sex with a virgin or that the body parts of albinos protect oneself or bring good luck. Tanzania has the highest rates of albinism in the world (affecting one in every 1,400 people) and has seen at least 75 murders of albinos, many of them children, since 2000—for body parts, which are sold for high prices on the black market. Tanzania, like other sub-Saharan (sunny and hot) African countries, has among the lowest coronavirus fatalities in the world, with just 21 total fatalities in a population of more than 60 million, for a rate of 0.35 per million. I don’t think we will learn much from their coronavirus approach. What we “learn,” from Tanzania and neighboring countries, is that the virus doesn’t spread in hot, sunny, outdoor places with poor sanitation. It thrives in cool gray climates where the citizens bathe in hand sanitizer and hide indoors.
Instead of believing something obviously wrong, the editors and writer at the New Yorker might have looked around the world and realized that we can find few if any correlations between policy and obedience and coronavirus outcomes. The editors might have noticed that sub-Saharan Africa sits in a particular climate zone, in which not a single nation has suffered high rates of coronavirus infections or fatalities. They might even have noticed that virtually no country anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere or the Tropics (Ecuador, an exception, is covered elsewhere) had any significant impact from the pandemic, which is nearly exclusively a Northern-Hemisphere problem—so far.
[Later, I wrote in more detail about the reasons for Africa’s low rates here and here.]
But—the U.S. is Bad!
The press see only politics. Information does not penetrate. Journalists are content to repeat the story of bad leadership in the U.S., conveniently overlooking the hundreds or thousands of examples from around the world disproving the story that the virus can be contained by policy and politicians. To believe that leadership and policy cause the disparities, we would have to accept that the U.S. (and just a tiny fraction of the U.S.) and northern Europe have the least competent or least caring leaders on earth.
Such a story ignores, for example, the case of Lagos, Nigeria, called the “epitome of urban decay” in a University of Lagos study, which said, “The metropolis is replete with environmental problems ranging from slums and squatter settlements, to crime and delinquency.” Lagos, with a population of 17.5 million, is the second-largest city on the African continent. The lowest temperature reached in February and March was 72, and it happened just once. Average lows were closer to 80 degrees. The coronavirus fatality rate in Nigeria is just one per million, about a hundred times safer than Germany and about 2,000 times safer than New York City. The only thing we can “learn” from them is we need higher temperatures and more time outdoors.
Yemen’s per capita income is about $2,500 per year. An article from the UN from 2019 titled, “Humanitarian crisis in Yemen remains the worst in the world, warns UN,” says, “The UN agency data shows that a total of 17.8 million people lack access to safe water and sanitation, and 19.7 million lack access to adequate healthcare. Poor sanitation and waterborne diseases, including cholera, left hundreds of thousands of people ill last year.” Yemen is a hot desert, with low rainfall and wide temperature ranges. Although lows regularly dipped below 50 in February and March, the highs were always near 80. And it was sunny. Yemen is 70% sunny in the winter, the reverse of northern Europe in winter or Boston and New York in March and April of 2020. Yemen’s coronavirus fatality rate is just two per million. Our novel coronavirus hates dry, sunny climates and wide temperature ranges. Only half of Yemen’s homes have electricity, which means they are less likely to sit in artificially warmed, non-circulating air. An environment that creates high risk for cholera creates low risk for coronavirus.
I’ve not seen headlines about U.S. homeless people getting sick and dying. I’ve seen plenty of headlines that they will get sick and die, but none that they are. Although the virus is present, few people have symptoms. Searching for stories about coronavirus in Africa yields the same results: the headlines do not, and cannot, say that people are dying, so instead they say that people will die. Yet the New Yorker credits African countries for their handling of the virus, a far-fetched idea.
We have the stories about meat-processing plants and assisted-care facilities, so we know the media are eager to tell us about hard-hit places, where people actually die. Yet we aren’t seeing stories about widespread illness or loss of life among the U.S. homeless. They are generally unaffected by the virus. What our homeless share in common with the population of Yemen or Lagos is time outdoors and low levels of developed-world maladies such as obesity and diabetes. Since we know that cases are transmitted indoors, it should not be surprising that a population that lives outdoors is at lower risk, despite being poor and vulnerable to other threats.
A friend was recently explaining that poor people die from the coronavirus, which has been a popular news headline since the beginning: essential workers, people who work outside the home, low-income people, minorities. I mentioned that health conditions such as obesity and hypertension put people at greater risk, and she said, “It’s socioeconomic.” At the risk of being pedantic, I said that although poverty correlates with obesity in our country, it is not the poverty that puts people at risk, but the poor health. She insisted, as the headlines have insisted: poor people are dying. It’s socioeconomic. Many people in nursing homes are not poor, yet nursing homes account for a third to half of all deaths from the coronavirus. The people are old, not poor. The virus doesn’t care what’s in your bank account, but it is dangerous to people with weak immune systems. Poor people worldwide, poorer than we can imagine, are not dying from the coronavirus.
It would be easy to dismiss such examples from Africa and the Middle East on the grounds that we can’t trust the reporting from their governments, that there is a massive cover-up going on. Yet we have examples of relatively high coronavirus rates and fatalities from chaotic or autocratic places such as Ecuador, Brazil, and Iran, and we see examples all around the Equator of extremely low coronavirus rates across hundreds of countries with all kinds of governments and cultures. Dry and sunny or wet and hot—any combination other than wet and cool—is inhospitable to the coronavirus.