Demetrius Minor is a member of the national advisory council of the Project 21 Black Leadership Network.







He is also the associate producer of the nationally-syndicated “Stacy on the Right” talk radio show. In addition to writing that has been featured in The Washington Times, Townhall.com and  by FreedomWorks, Demetrius is the author of the book Preservation and Purpose: The Making of a Young Millennial and a Manifesto for Faith, Family and Politics.







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I talked about the Corona virus a few weeks

back, and I mentioned that it could turn out to be nothing significant, or a

real problem, or a global pandemic. Clearly one of those three options is no

longer on the table.















I’m not a medic, and I’m certainly not an

expert on infectious diseases, so I don’t want to comment on something I don’t

know much about, you can get that from any barstool bore. But I do know a bit

about statistics, and I think that I’ve spotted something that isn’t being

reported, or at least not reported very widely.















After China, two of the worst-hit countries

are South Korea, and Italy. That’s handy because these countries are quite

alike in economic and population terms, and that allows us to make comparisons,

but they are very different in social terms. I know that Iran is reporting a

similar number of cases, but Iran is a closed country with a very different economy,

and it’s hard to get reliable information so I’m not including it here.







South Korea and Italy have a lot of

similarities, they have roughly the same population, 50 million and 60 million,

they are both wealthy developed countries, both in the OECD, with advanced

economies. And they’re both reporting high levels

of Corona virus – about 15 per hundred thousand in South Korea, about 30 per hundred

thousand in Italy.







But there is one statistic where they

diverge sharply. The death rate.