Endemic infections, vaccinations, and variability of SARS‐COV2 worldwide epidemiology: A cross‐sectional study

Abstract

The present article aims to analyze epidemiologic aspects of the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) over different countries across the globe. While analyzing the overall spread of the disease, clusters of countries could be identified where the population-adjusted number of cases and mortality rates (MRs) were significantly different from the others. To draw a comparison over the countries at the same stage of infection, the nature and spread of the infection was evaluated at the 90th day of the pandemic for each country. It was observed that the countries with prevalent malarial transmission tended to have lesser population-adjusted COVID-19 caseloads. It was further observed that high population coverage of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccination was negatively associated with populationadjusted caseloads and MRs due to COVID-19. The present cross-sectional study is an attempt to bring in several social, economic, and structural confounders into understanding of the nature and spread of this novel pandemic globally.

Citizen science initiative points at childhood BCG vaccination as a risk factor for COVID‐19

“…Regarding COVID-19, it has been proposed that trained innate immunity or heterologous T-cell responses induced by BCG vaccination may reduce disease incidence, morbidity and severity (Curtis et al, 2020;Giamarellos-Bourboulis et al, 2020;Jirjees et al, 2020;Kubota et al, 2020;Levi et al, 2021;Mantovani & Netea, 2020;Marín-Hernández et al, 2021;Pana et al, 2021;Wickramasinghe et al, 2020). However, considering the limitations of ecological studies, analyses of the links between BCG vaccination and COVID-19 incidence and mortality have shown no correlation (Hensel et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2021;Ricco & Ranzieri, 2021), negative correlation (Goswami et al, 2021;Singh et al, 2020) or changes in correlation patterns as the pandemic progresses (Kubota et al, 2020). Other factors that have been proposed to affect SARS-CoV-2 infection and disease morbidity and mortality include ABO blood group (higher and lower susceptibility to infection in individuals with A and O blood groups, respectively) (Hodžić et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2020), age (older age associated with COVID-19 severity and mortality) (Ho et al, 2020), antibody levels against glycan Galα1-3Galβ1-(3)4GlcNAc-R (α-Gal) present in midgut microbiota (lower antibody levels associated with higher disease severity) (Urra et al, 2020) and sex (male patients appear to be at higher risk of mortality) (Ritter & Kararigas, 2020).…”

Can Baicalein Become a New Drug for Covid-19?

“…At the same time, methods for coronavirus testing are being intensively sought and new drugs are being developed. Much progress has been made in the development of new vaccines (3)(4)(5), but new drugs are also being sought which are easier and cheaper to administer than vaccines (6). New drugs for COVID-19 infection are sought both among known drugs that have already been approved for other diagnoses and among newly discovered ones.…”