Tuberculosis versus COVID-19 Mortality: A New Evidence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3889/oamjms.2020.5248Keywords:
Bacillus Calmette–Guérin, Coronavirus, Immunity, Latent tuberculosis, ProtectionAbstract
BACKGROUND: Coronavirus current pandemic (COVID-19) is the striking subject worldwide hitting countries in an unexplained non-universal pattern. Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine was an adopted recent justification depending on its non-specific immune activation properties. Still the problem of post-vaccine short duration of protection needs to be solved. The same protective mechanism was identified in active or latent tuberculosis (TB). For each single patient of active TB, there are about nine cases of asymptomatic latent TB apparently normal individuals living within the community without restrictions carrying benefits of immune activation and involved in re-infection cycles in an excellent example of repeated immunity training sessions of the whole community.
AIM: We aimed to asses the correlation between TB burden and COVID-19 mortality in all affected countries having different BCG vaccination policies.
METHODS: Publicly available data were extracted for 191 countries including population size, TB estimations, national BCG vaccination policy, the World Health Organization regions and economic classification, and COVID-19 mortality and number of cases. The analysis was performed using Spearman’s correlation test.
RESULTS: Significant large negative correlation (−0.539, p < 0.001) was found between TB prevalence and COVID-19 mortality rate worldwide. Medium negative significant correlations were found between TB cases and COVID-19 mortality in the high and lower middle-income countries, and those having current BCG vaccination programs (−0.395, p = 0.001, −0.365, p = 0.015, and −0.476, p < 0.001, respectively).
CONCLUSION: Countries with high TB prevalence have higher chances of protection against COVID-19 mortality through the theory of widely distributed natural immune activation within community. Confounders should be assessed separately.
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Copyright (c) 2020 Hayder Al-Momen, Tareef Fadhil Raham, Aqil Mohammad Daher (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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