 I like to start on time. We usually run about an hour, by the way, or try to. So I'm going to start. Welcome, everybody. And this week, I'm going to be talking on the pandemic. And so in the past, we've had other presentations on the pandemic. I mean, nobody knew it was going to last for three years. But it's still around. So the title of COVID-19 pandemic postmortem is a little early, perhaps. I'll tell you about that. But we first, we had a presentation just a month or less than a month, a couple of weeks after it was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization back in 2020. And then as it looked like, and that was when there was only one million cases reported worldwide, that's way off from what we have now. And then we had a couple more, as it looked like we were going into year two. And there were a lot more cases and a lot of deaths. So we had one on how it impacted humans, and then also on the virus itself, and then a fireside chat. And then Dr. Hendricks and I both created this one and reviewed, and I'm presenting it. So let's take a look. I've got, by the way, this is really, really crammed with a lot of information. Oh, novel, no, really, no. Let's see. I gave a question to, yes, yes, OK. Exactly. COVID, oh, OK, lots going on. OK, so let's take a look. Now, first of all, I'm not trying to be flippant by saying post-mortem, because like I said, the pandemic's not over. In between mid-January, mid-February, there are 4 million cases, 28,000 deaths monthly. And the reason you might not see it in the news much anymore is because some people still think it's kind of old news. There's fewer deaths now than there was, and sometimes, and some people are fatigued over three years of hearing about the pandemic. But during the time that it was going strong, particularly in January when we did presentations, there were 100,000 COVID deaths weekly, which actually made it the third highest cause of death in the world and the first in the United States where I am. So it was definitely not a trivial thing. OK, good. I'm just checking. OK, so let's take a look. OK, this is what I'm going to present today. Like I said, by the way, this is absolutely a trend for information. No, well, OK, similar. Those are from, those are reported. OK, in other words, that's the data they had to use. That was the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine page that still has it, except that they took, in other words, they're not actively doing it anymore. Let me get the, they're not actively getting the information because they've been doing it for three years now. Let me get it for you. OK, so they've been doing it for three years now. You can find it here. It's just they've taken it, they're no longer reporting the information. But all of the information is still there. So you can go, that's where I got the information I had for today that stopped reporting on the 10th of March. Well, that's interesting there, Don. I don't know. It depends on, of course, if you're talking Medicare, you'll probably talk about the United States. But it certainly did impact, we're still feeling the reverberations all over the world. Well, and that's another excellent question because I'm going to be going over the data. And so you can only, in other words, OK, for science, you can only look at the data. But obviously, wow, absolutely. And so you can only look at the data that you have, but then, of course, collecting data is a whole science in itself. And so it's kind of like data or garbage in, garbage out. In other words, does the data that you have really reflect the situation or not? And I'll be actually talking about that. So let's take a look at what I'm going to talk about. First, take a look at diseases and how they spread. I'm not a, I talked to Dr. Hendricks about this to make sure it was correct. We'll take a look at past pandemics and how this one compares. We'll take a look at the, a graphical view of the pandemic timeline and then take a look at variants and then quite a bit on the pandemic behavior. Yes, and actually, I kind of did a little bit of my own. This presentation actually spent more time on this presentation than almost any other presentation I've done because the more I got into it, the more fascinating it became, both from the data and an analyst's side and statistical side and human side and everything. Well, and that's, yeah. And so tagline just, that's Dr. Hendricks. A tagline just put in something that's kind of alarming is if we end up with, in other words, deleterious, if we end up with something like the black plague, we're going to be in real trouble because it's just going to take out a few billion people and we'll be in, that will change history. I mean, it took a couple of hundred years to get back to so-called normal after the original black plague in Europe during the 1300s, mid-1300s. Okay, let's continue. Okay, so we're not, in other words, the microbes aren't in our world, we're in this. We just happened to be one of the species and they've had three and a half billion years of running, jump on us as far as evolution and how to work with other organisms and how to replicate themselves and stuff like that. And there's about 10 times as many as them. In fact, 10 times as many viruses and viruses are stars in the universe, which is almost, is really different. Now, by the way, we're doing this moon-based project and does anyone, you might remember that when humans first went to the moon that the first thing they did when they got back was be quarantined for three weeks. In fact, they went into this little sealed capsule and then it got trucked off to the mainland and such because they were concerned that there might be organisms on the moon that could contaminate humans and of course no humans would have any defense against them at all, particularly if they were far in biology or something. And so, in fact, I'm trying to remember how long they did that. Yeah, how long they did that. But in any case, so we're not concerned about, yes, and that's one of the things I'm going to take a look at, the black plate and what it did here as we compare pandemics. Okay, so we're no longer concerned about living organisms that we might pick up on the moon, but one of the things that we learned since then was essentially when you talk about any human being, we may do about a trillion human cells all trying to work together, sometimes not, so well. But we have about 10 trillion microbes on and in us which is a bizarre thing to think about. Okay, but what I want to leave from here is that most microbes are not disease producers. In other words, there's about a trillion species, only 1,400 create human disease. Of course, if you're the one that gets it, even viruses get diseased. So it's rampant. Well, that's, yeah, that's, I found that. And so obviously any numbers that you have or any numbers that you see and question, let's go ahead and question them because I'd like to make sure that my information is correct. Yeah, we are. Not only that, but I find it fascinating that our cells work together through hormones and, you know, enzymes and whatever. But they don't necessarily have to, in other words, they want to live. And sometimes they try to live beyond the time that they're supposed to die. A plan, what is it? Sinansi? So it's trying to remember. Brobsolescence and, you know, cancer cells, for example, just keep trying to live. Okay, so let's take a course of disease. For a little bit of biology and immunology for people who might not be, who may not know that field very well, but essentially what happens is the vector, like a mosquito or whatever the mosquitoes or tick or whatever is carrying, that may be a virus, bacteria, or a toxin, whatever, tries to get infection, depending on your genetics, your immunity against that particular bacteria, virus, et cetera, nutritional status, pregnancy, underlying disease, which is what the co-morbidity is. You may or may not get infected. You may be able to block it first. Like if I get a little cut, you know, I put some sort of thing like, okay, there, I was looking for the actual term. Apoptosis? How do you pronounce that? Apoptosis. Sales suicide. Exactly. Okay. So you may get infected. So you get infected, and then it depends on the ability to cause disease once you're infected because disease is interfering with the functions of apoptosis, apoptosis. Okay. So the disease is interfering with the functions of particular parts of your body. So just because you're infected may not mean that you get a disease. You may just have it, and it may be sitting, apoptosis. Okay. So anyway, then it depends on the virulence. For example, can anybody tell me one that's really, really virulent? It's like wild black plague, right? Okay, killed between a third and a half of, ooh, marbles, awful, or Ebola. Okay. So it depends on, yeah, pneumonic plague, for example. But if you're a little bug trying to replicate, killing off the host really quickly is not a great idea. What you want to do is you want to try to spit it. So you want to get people to have diarrhea or cough or mucus all over the place or things like that. Some bugs, of course, and I'm just going to use the word bug, but some bugs are very difficult to catch. Airborne ones are particularly nasty. Exactly, exactly. And the cold virus, which is the coronavirus, has been around for a long time. So it's kind of, you know, they're not smart, but they've certainly, the ones that survived, certainly have learned how to replicate. Okay. So virulence has to do with, is it going to kill you? Okay, so as a social phenomenon, we're looking at an incubation period. Now for COVID, this was anywhere from three to 14 days, depending on the variant, about three days for the latest Omicron variants. And it's the exposure to the first symptoms. It could be exposed. And then it may take a while before you start having those types of symptoms. Okay. And then you have this clinical illness where you have symptoms, but there is a latent period, which is between exposure and actually being infectious. So these are all terms having, and then infectious is when you can infect others. For COVID-19, it was a few days before the symptoms and up to perhaps 10 to 20 days after, and you may even be symptom-less and still be infectious. So this is not a presentation on infectious diseases, but I thought it was important to put that out there first because we're going to talk about a pandemic. We want to know, well, how does that work? Okay, this is really important too, because you can't get a pandemic unless you can get it going all over the world. And so how many people will one person infect? If you look at the influenza, not coronavirus, but the influenza virus of 1918, it had about a 2.5% mortality rate, and one person was likely to infect two or three people. So it took a little while to get it going, but then again, we didn't have a lot that we could throw at this. COVID-19 is really weird. It's about the same. Hi, Eileen. Okay, so it's about the same, but for example, as some of the variants start going, particularly Omicron, you're getting up to an effective reproduction number nearly the same as like mumps and measles. In fact, it was a weird thing, but I don't know who's old enough to remember. You don't have to say, but who's old enough to remember when parents used to bring their kids together so that everybody could get mumps and measles at the same time. They did it in my family, chicken pox, that sort of thing. Because it was so infectious, they are. Oh my goodness. Okay, but it was so infectious that they just absolutely, measles is bad stuff. They're better to have vaccination. Well, yes, I mentioned that George, I mentioned that that was kind of a, I didn't mean to be flippant on that. It just sounded like a good word to use, but the pandemic's still on. But something like Ebola or Marburg and stuff like that has first of all, a very low rate of reproductive because frankly kills off its host, which is not good. Okay, let's go on here again. I want to get to some other parts, but this is, I'm trying to cover all of, yeah, it's kind of a dark sense to you. Okay, so exactly. I'll never use terribly offended, right? It has double entendre stuff. Okay, so anyway, I wanted to cover all the different parts of a pandemic. So let's take a look at then, okay, so that's diseases and how diseases get started and how they spread and infect infectivity and stuff. But so let's take a look then how this pandemic compares with pandemics in the past. We've already talked a little bit about, for example, the black plague in Europe killed off a lot of the population. It is particularly violent. Oh, okay. I hear again that Dr. Hendricks probably has more. Well, okay, hold on there. I'm going to talk about herd immunity towards the end because there's really kind of a couple of ways of achieving that. And if you want to think about it, the black plague, since you brought it up, the black plague certainly produced herd immunity but it killed most of the people off. Now, on the other hand, it's not so violent with us because if you have any European background, you're a survivor of the black plague. And so, you know, the people that weren't are dead. And so that's one way to achieve herd immunity, but the same way with the 1918 influenza, it killed 40 to 50 million people and basically about a quarter of the people on Earth were infected, but that's not a good way to get herd immunity. There's a better way. And so I'll talk about that here in a second. Okay, so now HIV-AIDS is still a pandemic. It has been for 40 years and it's killed off 70 million people. No, excuse me, 70 million cases, 30 million deaths, but we've been able to figure out with a cocktail and stuff how to keep people from dying but at the very beginning, it was fairly fairly fair. But the big one, it has been smallpox. Smallpox has been around since prehistory and it was nearly totally eliminated in 1980 but it killed off hundreds of millions of people, particularly during the 20th century over its course. Now COVID-19 has had a minimum, we were talking about reporting and data, has had a minimum of about 670 million cases. That's what's been reported, that John Hopkins University School of Medicine put online, but only 7 million deaths. And the reason for that is there's many reasons for that and we'll take a look at that. In other words, more cases than almost any other, but that's also because we've got 8 billion. Well, it made very well. I'm taking these numbers off the John Hopkins site, which like I said are probably minimums and conservatives. Like for example, during the early stages of the pandemic, there were certain numbers of cases in the United States and then the people who actually knew better said, it's probably 10 times that. Yeah, that's the one I was looking at. I believe that map says 7 million, but it probably was a lot more deaths and a lot more cases. I frankly think that perhaps it's the same way as the 1918 flu, that maybe a quarter or more of the people on Earth got it, not just 675 million. Let's take a look at the actual data in a minute. I spent quite a bit of time analyzing the data myself and so I'll show you what my findings are. Okay, so let's take a look then at an illustration of the pandemic timeline. Okay, now this slide actually comes, yeah, and thank you for that confirmation. That's kind of where I've got some of these numbers. If it is something different, I definitely want to change the slide. Okay, this slide actually comes, it's been adapted from the first presentation we gave back in April of 2020. At that time, we were concerned that there were 1 million cases worldwide, not 675 million, and that the World Health Organization had declared this as a pandemic. But you can see the course there, is it actually, they think it probably started somewhere in November in China and then by the end of 2019, which is quite called COVID-19, is that the Chinese alerted the World Health Organization because there was a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases and then they found that this is something novel and then you started getting cases outside and deaths and it just went downhill from there, uphill, depending on whether you're looking at the graph or not. Okay, so now this is an interesting graph. This is, again, from most of the data here, it comes from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine site. This is the timeline up till now of the pandemic from a worldwide standpoint. Now, as I mentioned, I put a lot of information into these slides, so let me just point out a few things. One is the little white box there on the right is the waves of the 1918 pandemic. By the way, let me go back here because a lot of people like to, let me go back to one of the other slides. This one, not this one. This one, this one there with the thing. Why is it called the 1918 was sometimes called the Spanish flu? I have a purpose for asking this question. Anybody know why it was sometimes referred to as a Spanish flu? In fact, it's referred to as a Spanish flu. Well, that's an interesting point. Is it actually during World War I, during World War I, the journalists agreed, can you imagine journalists agreeing to anything right now, particularly from government and stuff, but the journalists agreed that in World War I, they didn't want to concern people with what was going on at the trenches. There wasn't like a video that you could take right now or whatever. In other words, the information could be filtered a little bit. Well, now Mike, that's exactly correct and that's why I wanted to do this. It wasn't the Spanish flu. What was happening was it was basically in the places where U.S. soldiers were and since Spain was neutral and they had cases, they could report, well, and you're right. That's kind of what it really should be called. So they had cases going on in Spain and so they could record what's going on in Spain. The Spain was neutral. It wasn't at the front. And so it was sometimes reported as the Spanish flu. So it was a little bit of propaganda, you want to say, but the idea is these little viruses in back here really don't care where you come from. It's not the U.S. flu. It's not the French flu. It's not the Chinese flu. It's a pandemic that goes around the world. It just happened to start with U.S. soldiers and the U.S. soldiers then went over to Europe and spread it. And that's kind of how it got going in the 1918 one. That's why you have, and then they came back and spread it in the U.S. and so that's why you got that huge spike in 1918 and then of course during the winter there's a flu and so it caused more deaths in 1919 and then again so it actually lasted for a few years also. So I wanted to throw in that. But if you look, yeah, yeah. Okay, so if you look at the, like I said, there's a lot of data here. If you look at this one slide, you'll see that there are ways to begin with and then the very first cases hit the most vulnerable people. So you can see that where it says A, there weren't a lot of cases worldwide, but there were a strong spike in deaths because people that were most vulnerable were dying of this and then you had the variants come along and the ones that were most virulent or that spread the most were like Alpha, Delta, Omicron, I'll talk about that. Okay, and tagline, that's good to know. In other words, I'd like to have that kind of information. I can look at it on the Zoom video and stuff because I want to know. The reason I did these presentations is A, I'd love to do research and B, I'd like to share it with you because I get real information from you. So I always learned something during these presentations. I appreciate comments. Okay, so you had a lot of deaths worldwide during the first variants where you got Alpha and Delta, which is the B to C area and then Omicron came along and it really changed things because anyone that had not gotten it got it. That's why I'm saying it probably went just about everywhere. Body in the world probably got exposed to this thing. Just you may not have got symptoms. So it's difficult to say there's a case of something where people didn't get symptoms. And then of course the vaccinations came along with more immunity and so you've got it somewhat peering out but like I said, it's definitely not done. Okay. So in the first months of... ...weaponize your hands, okay. Okay, so in the first months of the pandemic, people got the idea that this was kind of an old person's disease. In other words, okay, great, let's shut up the old people and go about business as usual. And because in the very first months, you had basically most cases were of people 16-older and then some people got severe and then critical and didn't die. But this is not the case. Now this is... I like these graphs. This is a graph actually here where I am in Texas in the U.S. But three years later, 75% of the cases were among younger people. Not the elderly. But 75% of the deaths were among older people. Whereas the 1918... Remember, the 1918 was an influenza virus. This is a highly mutated coronavirus. But the influenza one attacked mainly people of soldier age, college age. That sort of thing, okay. But so the big thing is this is not an old person's disease. Okay, in the first months of the pandemic, you can see the nations that are trying to get a grip on this. Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, which all are places that can be isolated pretty easily, either islands or peninsulas. Yeah, and then... Okay, and then you'll notice on the left there, you'll see the mainland China through a number of measures, which I'll talk about here in a minute. And South Korea both kind of got a grip on the pandemic. And other nations didn't. So by the time you had mid-March, you've got a pandemic. Okay, let's talk a bit about... That's kind of the rough timeline. Let's talk a little bit about the variants. Here's some of the first mutations in the first half a year of the or less of the pandemic. And so you've got some of these mutations, some of these mutations which because of their nature, what the mutation was of, you had what they call viruses of concern or viruses of interest, viruses of concern, particularly the alpha and delta, which you'll notice on the graph were the ones that caused the most deaths per number of cases, were the ones that were watching. Now over time here, there were a lot more mutations. You'll see up in the upper thing the ones that are in red are the ones that they were concerned about, do you see on them that there were a lot of other mutations. And then of course Omicron came along. And Omicron had mutations of the spike proteins, which are what helped the virus to... Now, Dr. Hendricks helped me out here, but the spike proteins that... Is that the one that helps them glom on or to get in or to replicate or to whatever? But the idea is that the Omicron one was way more infectious even if it might be less lethal. And so they knew a lot about these mutations, but they can't say where your mask, et cetera, or any other measure. But make you feel blue. Okay. Let's see, helpful person, too many arcane... Yeah. We need to have a named after movie stars or something, so we... Yeah. Or something that people would remember and be able to say. But I'm not picking on the Netherlands, but I love the graph here. This is the best graph that I found. But if you look at the worldwide timeline, you've got worldwide up there. Well, you've got the original mutation. They've affected humans. You've got Alpha, Delta, Omicron, et cetera and stuff. But if you look at Netherlands, a lot of people kept track of what variant people had. And so you can see the ones which are most infectious going through a population. So at the very beginning in the Netherlands, you had the first mutation after the original, the Alpha. And you can also see that there are a lot of deaths, both from the original or at least per case. In other words, I had very few cases, but you have a spike of deaths with the original, one that infected humans. You've got Alpha, which then caused... Delta came along and then Omicron. And everywhere was a huge spike of cases of the Omicron one. And there's lots and lots of variants. So I would imagine right now everybody, if they have it or got it recently. Okay, and there you go. So February 20th is just about the right... Yeah, exactly. Okay, the tagline, please. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so then let's talk about, because this is the one I wanted to talk about the most here, was behavior. A lot of this is my own, which if you're still recovering, a lot of times that is called long COVID. I actually, I'm almost positive I got the Omicron variant in mid-February this year. And it was different than anything else I've ever gotten. I still have symptoms from it. And they're resolving. But I have a feeling it's like, you know, hiding in some closet in the back. Yeah, well, I went all this time without getting it. And then I did what I told the doctor just a second. I actually had to cop just then, is I told the doctor that I committed several, potentially deadly sins, which is I went, I had a big Thanksgiving with family and Christmas with family that we sponsored. And then I went to my granddaughter's wedding and I saw a movie during the week. I mean, I was trying not to. And then, you know, aid out and, you know, all of these sorts of things that could easily get. Yeah, I know. So anyway. Oh, yeah. And then, yeah, the river viking thing. I went on a viking river boat. I was over in Europe for three weeks. So, you know, if there's any way to catch it, I would have got it. Which I did. Exactly. Avatar 2, that's how I got it. Probably from the Avatar movie. Okay. Well, whatever. So luckily I'm getting over it. But it was worse than anything I've had in a long time. I didn't like it. But it only lasted about a week and now I'm just getting over it. Okay. So let's take a look at pandemic behavior. Let's take a look at individual community, national and then regional behavior. And if you learn nothing, take a look. Well, and dearly, you know, everybody should still be doing that. And I do that in a lot of places. But while I do that in a lot of places, which is sometimes I have not, and all it takes is one time, you know. Okay. So let's take a look then at individual behavior. If you get nothing out of this presentation, I'd like you to take a look at some of the stuff I'm doing right now. So pandemic. So first of all, from an individual standpoint, a pandemic, there's a lot that goes into it. One is kind of, okay, robotic plague and smallpox. You could tell people that were infected. And now was it Norway or Sweden? I thought it was Sweden that did that. Sweden. Yes. Okay. So I had hoped that perhaps maybe this pandemic, you know, if COVID-19 would turn your skin green or something, then we would have all known who was infected. But it didn't. And it didn't create, in other words, from an outside standpoint, other than coughing and sneezing and stuff. It didn't create the types of symptoms that people would have. In other words, without seeing, it's hard to believe for some people. Okay. Yes. Oh, you do? Okay. Well, I still have, I mean, we can compare symptoms. If I still have that post-nation drip, I still got several other things, which I never have had in my life. Kind of morning cough, tiredness, all of that stuff. Okay. So individual, well, yeah, but I wouldn't know, you know, my brain's the same thing. So there's also needs of a person's wants. In other words, you need to go to work to pay for things. Most people live on the edge and they can't be just shut up in the house for a month. Your children, your relatives, need to go to school and you can go to the store, all of that stuff like that. Now on the other hand, like in my case, my granddaughter was getting married. The holidays were there. Some people get depressed if they don't go out. You know, that sort of thing. So those are kind of needs of this is wants. Then there's the idea, well, who do you believe? Do you believe disease authorities? Or do you believe your family or friends who kind of heard that this is going on or your politicians or clergy's, you know, all of that. And then for some people, they find the whole thing very complicated and set up. But frankly, and I'm going to go to the next slide. It's not that complicated. Okay. The idea is one. To the left is a bulletin put out in 1918 by the New York Department of Health. It basically said, okay, there's a new disease. Keep out of crowds. It spreads mainly from the hearing, cover up coughs and sneezes, wash your face, hands, the boy gathered. Have you heard this? I mean, that was back 100 years ago. So the main thing, and this may save your life people. So, you know, take a look at this is the main thing is you have an immune system and you want to increase your defenses. So the analogy there is instead of just a gate, instead of just a low fence, you want to have a castle. So you stay as healthy as you can through good nutrition, sleep and good practices, masks and stuff. And then you get vaccinated because vaccinations have proven to work for the past 200 years. Yes, they do. And I'll talk a little bit more about that and I get toward the end of the presentation. And then the other thing is give your immune system a chance. There's limit your exposure. How many people are storming the gates? And that's really the bottom line. How many little viruses are storming your immune system? So you stay away from where the virus is concentrated. That's easy. You wash your hands, sanitize your services, wear a mask, particularly if it's airborne, that doesn't do any good if it's not, except for, you know, touching your face. So you work them at community behavior. Yes, that cytokine storm is actually what killed most people in 1918 from my understanding. In other words, a superb, you know, young people, superb immune systems, and they overreacted and you got that thing that was able to kill them. So for them, the idea is to not be exposed. Of course, if you're a soldier in the trenches, that's kind of hard to do. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was just mentioning is it was the young people who attended. That was the graph. Okay, so from a community concept, it only takes one. And I've got a little quote there from, and I need to copy that. Okay, back. I took a little, I took a time to put a little Star Trek thing in there. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. So if you care about family, friends, yeah, others and stuff, don't be the one in that graph there to infect anybody else. We're basically our own worst enemy. Now, here's what I thought about herd immunity. First of all, one of the things you're trying to do if you want to limit deaths is to do it's called flatten the curve. In other words, you don't want to get so many people sick that it overwhelms the health system, including workers who also die of their. They're not immune. And we had quite a few people that were health workers at the very beginning die. So you want to spread out the number of cases and deaths so that it allows the healthcare system to treat the sick. So you don't have quite as many deaths. It's not like the black plague, which it could very well be if you just did nothing. Okay. So and it was virulent enough. Okay. So now herd immunity. You can get a tune of herd immunity means that you have a high enough percentage of immune people so that the virus, you know, tries to attack one person and another and another. And it just doesn't spread very rapidly because it hits people who are immune. And so there's two options for doing that. Option one is you just let this thing run. You just let it spread. Well, that's 1918 and that's the black play. You're going to get the maximum number of deaths that way. Because the issue is the more people that are affected. The other way is it's not just the initial mutation. The number of people, the more people that are infected, the more mutations, the more little viruses out there and the more chance to mutate. And then it potentially more deaths because you don't know whether the next mutation is going to be more effective, more lethal. If it's more lethal, we're really in trouble. So the best option is to achieve immunity by vaccination because that first log gets the herd immunity that you want, but in a controlled way. In other words, you're not just gambling on whether your immune system is strong enough for you to live and not die. But otherwise you're just, you know, flowing the people with low immune systems to the wall, so to speak. Okay. Okay. Pandemic behavior. Let's take a look then at national. A lot of this part is my own research using the data that I could get. First of all, national strategies. In some countries there was really tight control. I mean, quarantining cities, mandatory masks. And then in other cases, like you brought up Sweden, yeah, you don't want to have all the mutations because you don't know how they're going to react. That's like spinning the, you know, gambling wheel and hoping that the next one's better. That just doesn't make any sense because mutations try, you know, you don't know what's going to happen. In the case of Omicron, you ended up with one that was way more infectious than the ones before. Okay. And death is not the only result of this stuff. It's loss of productivity. It's infecting people who do have immune system that are not as strong like older people and family and friends, you know, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. There are also nations that simply had no controls. In other words, they just counted on people to do the right thing, which didn't work. Well, in a lot of cases, unless you were in more of a collective versus individual, individualist type place where people looked after others before their own health. In other words, wearing a mask for a month was the price she took to not infect a whole bunch of people. Okay. Or limited control. In other words, one moment they go, oh, they're not, you know, a mandatory mask, and then everybody protests. And then they go, okay, no, it's lifted. We've got to get back to our economy. In other words, CSONG back and forth. No wonder people were confused. We leave it up to regions. You go, in the case of the United States, you go, well, I guess it's up to each state as to determine what should happen. Well, that's nice as states can hold off the border, but, you know, or an EU, each country going, well, we have our own rule rules here. Nobody, you know, hopefully nobody would have been infected throughout the, you know, it just doesn't work that way. Okay. So the healthcare systems, they can either be highly prepared, you know, well-stabbed, prepared, plenty of vaccines, free testing, all that stuff, or totally unprepared, which in underdeveloped countries, that's often the case where they're underfunded, few vaccines, or they didn't get vaccines until year three, poorly equipped, et cetera. I also mentioned the who do you believe, because this is at a national level, and environmental differences. Now, that can be positive or negative. In the developed world, people live a lot of times in artificial environments, and they don't go out into that, you know, icky garden or play with dirt. One of the reasons I think I have a good immune system for, you know, someone in their 70s is because I played in the dirt, and I played outside, yeah, I played outside and in the dirt this morning, I was nearly in the dirt planting a bush. And I think, and I've been doing that, you know, my whole life and going on hiking and doing stuff. So yeah, I think I've got it because I haven't just lived in a air conditioned house. And, but if you also have older populations like in developed world, oh, I forgot to throw a slide in there about the population pyramid. But, and that's a long one that I need to read, but somebody read it. Okay. So, and we're not used to new diseases. We're in developing world. People are, I'm really generalizing. People live closer to nature. This disease is common. You know, younger populations in a lot of places in developing countries, you might have 50% of the population under 16 or under 20. Yeah. And so the immune systems have seen a lot of stuff. So they're basically prepared for some new virus to come along because frankly, they've seen it before, the immune system. Okay. I'm going to look at them at regional. Like I said, this part is the one where I did the, well, I haven't got the graphic. Okay. Regional things basically, like I said, collective versus individual. Collective is basically you're thinking of your community or family above yourself, whereas individual, the US happens to be the most individualist nation on earth is the, a lot of people will think, well, you know, everybody for themselves, survival of the fittest. Or in some cases, you know, God will protect me. I deserve to be, you know, whatever you want to put out there, but they, a lot of people don't look at community or family or whatever, quite as much as. Well, there you go tagline. That's exactly. Yeah. In other words, getting away from nature. Okay. Also, urban versus rural. There's a lot of countries and regions that are naturally isolated from each other because they're fairly, the cities are fairly wide apart. They never even had cowpox. Although cowpox might have helped you. Okay. And then border control. And so in other words, there's a lot that goes into this type of thing. Now, let me show you what before I run out of time, let me show you some of the stuff I did. Same thing with a pet. All my life, that sort of thing. Even today, I've got eight chickens and two dogs. And I play in the yard. Okay, so this is the early months. These are the countries that got, and I found a, in fact, I said, you know, that looks a lot like the major air traffic routes in the world. And I found an article that had a, okay, yeah, there it goes across the community. So I had a, I found an article that said, you know, the cases, the first cases of SARS-CoV-2, which is named the virus, which became the COVID-19 disease. Cal, yeah. Lavash. Absolutely. Okay. So looked a lot like the air traffic route. So this was the, now this next slide is supposed to scare you. This is what we ended up with. In the early months of 2003, the ones in orange, by the way, are the ones that still have the most active cases right now, which you can see that's distributed around the world. These are the total number of cases that people had. And like other people have mentioned, these are likely minimals. And I don't, like I said, I don't want to be flippant about this because these are, numbers are so impersonal, but every single one of these numbers, these hundreds of millions or tens of millions, is a person. Every case, every death affects, we have cows behind us. Our dogs like to bark at the cows, too. Every case, every death affects many more people than just the 670, 676 million people. And I suspect that's a low number. In other words, I would say it's actually probably in the birds. Okay. Now this is new. You're not going to find this anywhere because this is what I, this is the data I pulled out of the John Hopkins six. What I did was I took regents and the regents can possibly have a genetic similarities. But on the other hand, it may be because they cross borders. So here's East Asia. Now East Asia, first of all, a lot of the cultures here are collective cultures with strong government action that mostly contain the pandemic until over. Of course, then everybody got it. You can see in some nations like when Mongolia, that vaccinations weren't quite as available. You can also see that Mongolia is kind of an outlier as far as these other nations. Because most of these nations there were able to hold off until Omicron. And one of the things is if you look at Japan, unfortunately, Japan was able to hold off until Omicron. And now it's experiencing the most cases of the most deaths than during the entire pandemic. And then Mongolia actually looks a lot like one of the nations to the west of there rather than East Asia being inland. So let's take a look at some of these other ones. This is Australia. And I looked it up. Australasia actually is a term for this area with Australia, New Zealand, proper New Guinea. Proper New Guinea has a little different profile. It looks a lot more like the nations to the north of it. I do. I have a slide for Cuba. I have a slide. I did 70 countries. Not only the profiles, but also a measure of, and in the blue box, what I did was basically I divided a number of reported cases divided by population of the country. And then the incidence of death, I did total deaths per 1,000 cases. And that's the numbers you see. The ones which are in orange, for example, popular New Guinea, they only reported less than a percent of their population getting it, but you'll see that the death rates higher by about 10 than the other nations. Probably because what you're looking at is something that's under reported. There's quite a few nations that are like that, and you'll see a graph here at the end that shows that, yes, your hotspots pretty much overlapping, etc. And then there's the world to reference it, the little one on the world. So my interpretation of this area was that these are island nations. Or so they could actually contain it a bit. Or there was government action that mostly contains the pandemic until Omicron. So you had fewer is less deadly overall. Let's take a look at Oceania. These aren't really island nations. You'll see that there was almost no case. The little yellow star is where Omicron comes in. And you'll see in places like Samoa or Micronesia. There's no Micronesia had almost no vaccines available to them. But they were able to hold off until Omicron. VG was a little different. VG looks a little bit more like the country's near it, like popular beginning stuff, where you had most cases of deaths in Delta. And by the time Omicron came off, basically, by the time Omicron came around there was basically nobody left to have it. So this is but if you look at the thing, it's very complicated. So basically, island nations mostly were able to contain the pandemic despite less vaccine until Omicron. Okay, let's keep going. Somebody asked about Cuba. Otherwise, this is Southeast Asia. If you look at this where you kind of go down the peninsula from Bourbon or Myanmar to Thailand and Malaysia, there's a very similar pattern here, except for Malaysia where Thailand and Myanmar either under reported or that it was difficult to move around the country. Jungles, transportation, whatever, because it or they're immune. I mean, there's so many different ways of looking at this data, but basically it's all the same. In other words, that's not a coincidence. Now, you look at the other countries here and you've got Cambodia and in case Laos and Vietnam all looking the same as Thailand and Burma and Malaysia. Philippines is very different possibly because there was more exposure to the outside. It's got a different type of profile. Singapore was one of the countries that did better than almost any other country on earth to contain the number. In other words, 0.40 means that either 40% of the country got it or some people got more than one case of it. So 0.4 is an indicator of the number of cases per population. Well, you know, tagline that's exactly there are a lot of countries. I mean, I'm coming up on the hour and I'm going to go over that in about 10 minutes if you can hang around because I've got a summary idea in here and I want to go through the 70's ones. Like I said, there's a lot of information and I don't want to just breeze through it. But think of it from a political standpoint there's several reasons why you might have underreported. One is like Kazikistan at one time said or Kazakhstan I think it was basically said I don't want you to hear that word I don't want to report it. It is nothing. We've got everything under control. At least for a while. Yeah, I understand that's very unpleasant of me. Okay, I appreciate you can. I try to keep this to an hour if you need to go. No problem. I'm going to try to make this there is a display within walking distance of the amphitheater and it's about three years old now but I'm going to take this information and I'm going to have it over there to claim the slide. You're not going to miss anything if you are interested in this. And Singapore I did a good job you can notice the green there as far as the number of we had a lot of cases but very little deaths because they did a good job. Here's South Asia so except for Pakistan which seemed to get hit at every possible time both the original on Alfred and Delta and Omicron you've got a lot of people where Delta was the biggie in other words more cases of death before Omicron and then data interpretation I think this is important too there's a lot of ways to interpret it okay you can either have it can either be in other words why are there low cases but high percentage of death for cases well one is under reported cases in other words if you're symptomless or not a lot you don't go to hospital you might not get reported mostly immune populations like I was mentioning in developing countries mostly young population mostly only cases of death so those are the only ones that are reported and then you have to look at some of the other regions okay here's the other region there aren't that many we're almost to the end here so English well there is numerical evidence of underreports and statistical methods can do that this is a very rough idea of saying well you ought to look at underreporting um okay up till now there weren't a lot of early deaths but now as you go further this west you're going to see that there are a lot of cases a lot of deaths at the very beginning thank you Seseji um so you'll see in here that first of all nations in western Asia which is a little bit of a Eurocentric way of looking at um it likely reflects the complex policies and connections that these nations have so you want to try to take a look at South Asia to see the differences okay so here's Africa Africa is huge so I divided it up into different sections north Africa, west Africa now if you look at this you've got particularly ones in the south that you've got some people that have early cases and then you've got multiple ways um and a lot of what I would call underreporting going on here let's go on and take a look at uh central, southeastern Africa look at those almost uh you look at those you know wave wave wave they look very similar to each other you can tell that there's a lot of uh going on between countries um in order to get that kind of stuff a lot of underreporting in other words or high immunization going on but um and then only the people who were really sick got it okay South Europe and Southeast Europe a lot of early reports well yes and if I had a lot of time to do this is because I wanted to do some raw analysis and then you could get what I'd love to do would be to correlate this with age in other words if you look at the population which nations had really young people which had a lot of old people um transportation I mean there's all kinds of different ways you could look at this uh statistical causes of death I mean there's a lot of ways in which you could find some really cool patterns I think by looking at this but you'll see in here in South Asia where Spain and Italy of course were hit hardest or some of the hardest hit nations then you can see what happened after that where Delta and the Nomecon were Greece and Turkey and stuff and so some of the these patterns are very interesting here's Eastern Europe a lot of them look well that's why this is not in other words the explanations are not simple that's culture the explanations are not simple so how do you filter out a particular factor where you can't so you'd have to do some as somebody mentioned in I think the last presentation you'd have to do a lot of multivariable analysis in other words advanced statistical methods to see which ones actually are factors and which ones are just what's the word for a variable that is just confusing co-founding variable um confounding variable not co-founding, confounding variable okay so on here you can see Eastern Europe the some of the same patterns over and over again um but what I'm getting at is on these patterns is it's probably not a coincidence that countries with these neighbors have the same sort of patterns in this pandemic which is the reason why it was a pandemic in other words there's a lot of the borders are porous you've got people and friends in different borders and stuff Eastern Europe here also vary now Sweden you'll notice over there on Sweden is that up at the top left