By Steve Sailer
03/19/2020
Why has Italy (60 million people, median age 46) had almost two orders of magnitude more deaths than Japan (126 million people, median age 48)?
I don’t know.
Similarly, why has Northern Europe had a lower death rate per case than Latin Europe (Italy, Spain, and now France)?
A really clear North vs South picture is emerging in Europe.
North (including Ireland) has low death/ICU rates.
South (including France) has high death/ICU rates.
UK/USA are inbetween.
This might be down to testing, but I wouldn’t say it’s the only reason. pic.twitter.com/MwxcPjhXIn
— David W. Higgins (@higginsdavidw) March 18, 2020
Worldometer is one of the more popular scoreboards for tracking coronavirus cases by country. One concern is that obscure methodological issues might be getting in the way of making apples to apples comparisons between countries. Who knows how precisely all these different countries count cases and deaths?
Maybe Northern Europeans are more introverted than Southern Europeans, so there has been less community spread?
Might explain how Japan has (so far) sidestepped the worst of it: they notoriously live more virtually from their rooms, whereas Italians live more in the streets and cafes. The Japanese tend to need to get drunk to be super-sociable, while Italians don’t.
One test case of this will be Finland, which hasn’t been too hard hit so far. We will see whether it plays out more on the Italian or Japanese trajectory.
Suggestions include: Italians kiss, Americans shake hands, Japanese bow.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.