COVID and COPD from another perspective

 I mentioned in the previous post that COVID and small-particulate matter (and thus COPD) might have some sort of causal relationship.    That led to some additional questions--duh!!!

The first question I posed for myself was just how big is this COPD problem around the globe.  I've herein several times made the point that it is a bigger disease death issue than almost any other specific disease, but it has mostly been anecdotal rather than quantitative.

With my partner, Scott Futryk, at AstroVirtual Inc, we've been using several AI tools for data extraction and compilation--way faster and easier than doing it 'the old way'.  Once we had satisfied ourselves that we are finding 'accurate data' (which by the way has not been all that easy), we set about to ask some COPD questions.

Well, here are some interesting findings.  First, the map of the world COPD prevalence, in terms of deaths per 100,000 population by country (USA on the next chart):

So India, China, the Philippines, and a few African nations are the most at risk.  Have you been to either Beijing or Bengaluru (nee Bangalore)?   Air so thick it is hard to see buildings four blocks away.  Far worse than Los Angeles when I was growing up there in the 1950s.

As for the US, it has been an evolution, migrating from the Rocky Mountains to the central Southern states over the past twenty years (partially smoking trends, partially fossil-fuel power plants???). 

But to ask about COPD is to be a bit narrow, so we asked for the full definition by WHO (World Health Organization); it came out something like this.   If you ask about incidence, more people by far 'have asthma than COPD, but it is 'just' disabling and uncomfortable rather than a killer.  Moreover, there are effective drugs and treatments for asthma by comparison with COPD.

Other forms of respiratory distress, of coure, exist.  Lung Cancer, a deadly killer; penumonia is a common killer for hospitalized patients for other reasons.  So here is a more complete WHO list:

So COPD is almost as big a killer in total worldwide deaths as all the respiratory cancers and pneumonia combined--surprise!  But the age distribution is quite different for these various issues:

And so are the gender death-rates, especially notable worldwide for the much higher male death-rate for these canceers (smoking mostly?):

A final question might be "How fast are these growing, or hopefully shrinking, over two decades?

Note that these are absolute deaths, and the world's population has been growing over this two-decade period, so the actual growth rates are much lower than these numbers would suggest.  The world's 2020 population estimate was 6.1 billion folk, while 2020 numbers are about 7.85 billion, a growth ~ 29%

Using this divisor changes the numbers substantially:

Respiratory infectious deaths were down 33%, not just 14%

Respiratory disease deaths (COPD mostly) were DOWN 6% rather than up 21%

And respiratory cancers were only up 14% instead of nearly 50%.

So, there's a bit of a deep dive into more about COPD and other respiratory diseases and deaths than you probably wanted to know.  

But, how does all of this stack up against the ills of COVID during, say, the first or 2nd year it hit?

Confirmed Deaths WW for 2020 were 1,815,000, which is only about half of the accredited COPD deaths for the same period.   After-the-fact assessments, though, based on comparison with "Excess Deaths" on a global basis placed the number of COVID deaths around 3.0 million, not that far from the Worldwide COPD death totals.

For 2021, the numbers were substantially higher, vaccine deployment notwithstanding.  The estimate for two full years (2020 and 2021) by the United Nations Dept of Ecominc and Social Affairs 

https://www.un.org/en/desa/149-million-excess-deaths-associated-covid-19-pandemic-2020-and-2021    said that 14.9 Million deaths in total were COVID-dependent.  If true, this would indicate that for the primary two years of COVID rampage in the world, it was responsible for twice as many deaths as COPD each year.

Now, it might seem amazing to compare the amount of money spent on COVID vaccine research and treatment methods and equipemnt with that of the COPD investments, and find that the disparity was like 40:1.   COPD has for some reason remained outside the mainstream of the medical worldview for where research and treatment efforts should be spent (have I made that point in this blog for 15 years?).

And yes, as nearly as I have been able to find out, the research team at Geo Washington Univ in St. Louis is the only research center with multi-year study of 1 micron and smaller particulates and their impact on COPD victims.   If you know of other institutions with such a focus, I'd greatly appreciate learning about them.  Kinda like the asinine view of both CDC and WHO for 2 years that COVID was spread by contact rather than aerosols.   Crowd blindspots happen so frequently . . . .