Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others? by By Siddhartha Mukherjee

Great Read: "While the virus has ravaged rich nations, reported death rates in poorer ones remain relatively low. What does this epidemiological mystery tell us about global health. The task is to factor in intrinsic vulnerabilities (such as age or obesity) and extrinsic vulnerabilities (the structures of households, the levels of interpersonal contact); challenges for our medical mathematicians: are the risks greater for a younger country with a larger family size but with infrequent social contacts or for an older country with a smaller family size but frequent contacts?"Ockham’s razor is one of the strange ironies of intellectual history -- the idea that, when seeking the cause of an event, we should favor the most parsimonious solution—the simplest one. .. shaving away extraneous hypotheses to arrive at a straightforward and singular explanation for whatever they were puzzling over."