COVID-19: Smaller countries (< 70 Million) – 2020/09/03

After having spent a fairly long time in the fifth position in the world for the number of COVID cases, South Africa moved down to the sixth position after Peru overtook it on 27 August. Ironically, Peru was in the fifth position up to 19 July when South Africa moved upwards into that position. Yesterday Colombia also moved past South Africa (which is now in the seventh position).

Last week I remarked that Peru, Colombia and Argentina are all on an upward trend in terms of their positive cases, but that Peru and Colombia seemed to have passed their peak, while Argentina may still be on an upward trend. This is indeed what happened, as can be seen below where I compare the number of new infections per million from last week with those of this week (last week’s numbers in brackets):

Argentina: 217.75 (181.59)
Colombia: 171.18 (196.47)
Peru: 217.01 (238.25)

As the number of cases in France keep on increasing, they have now overtaken the Netherlands and is on the point of overtaking Italy for the number of infections per million of the population. Despite the growth in infections in Spain, Argentina is also on the point of overtaking Spain.

I had the opportunity today to listen to a webinar presented by six medical professors from a variety of disciplines in the UK on “Long COVID”. It has been found that a fair percentage of people who had COVID (either tested or untested), have long-term symptoms or “chronic COVID”, lasting for several weeks or even three months or more. Symptoms are primarily severe fatigue and continuous coughing. One of the presenters, Prof Paul Garner, had COVID without severe symptoms, but 21 weeks later he still suffers from severe fatigue. Contrary to the COVID infections, it seems as if younger people might be more susceptible to chronic COVID than older people. This surprised me. Also that people who are physically very active also suffer from Long COVID. I’ll include a link or two where some of these presenters had published academic articles on Long COVID. But the main takeaway is that we still do not have the answers and it was said specifically that even those at the forefront of research on COVID have to admit that there is so much that they do not know about the virus, that it is virtually impossible to predict what is going to happen in the future.

• https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3218
• https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3026
• https://blogs.bmj.com/…/paul-garner-people-who-have-a…/
• https://www.thelancet.com/…/PIIS0140-6736(20…/fulltext