Hello, this is Ronnie.
This is probably old news (May 2022), but I wasn't the writer of this blog at the time this paper was published. Together with our co-authors, we decided to analyze serological and mortality data from his 62 studies on 25 developing countries.in this paper A paper published in BMJ Global Health found that age-specific IFRs were approximately twice as high as a meta-regression of benchmarks for high-income countries.
Because vaccinations and „new treatments“ disrupt things, we used studies from before they were common in developing countries and compared them to benchmarks from high-income countries. We also fixed the lack of death verification, which was a highly heterogeneous problem across studies/locations.
One of the problems in developing countries is the fact that seroprevalence rates are fairly uniform across the ages, a sign of the inability of these countries to protect older adults. High-income countries tend to have higher seroprevalence among younger, less vulnerable populations.
Since this publication, other studies have found similar alarming results, supporting and distributing vaccines to everyone against future pandemics, without keeping them in high-income areas first. It is emphasized that it is important to