40% of the world's population lives in a dengue area. I believe it's even higher for malaria. And with global warming it's getting even higher. That's pretty spread around the globe.
I think they are quite similar, but the point was rather that malaria does not in fact spread around the globe but affects only those people living/working/travelling in endemic areas, and in fact it's not getting higher, the number of people infected annually is decreasing and more countries are malaria-free, and more areas within those countries are malaria-free.
Malaria certainly damages the tourist economy of countries, but if you travel somewhere and catch malaria, it's not going to cause a pandemic in your home country.
Yes economically COVID will screw the world. But the thread was about deaths in majority world countries from the virus, not secondary economic effects.
We don't know how many deaths are occurring in these countries. They are unlikely to publish timely or accurate statistics on deaths. It costs almost a month's wages in Indonesia to get a covid-19 test that will be counted in official statistics.
Although statistics on TB, diarrhea, malaria, etc. are necessarily estimates as well, at least we have a vaguely reasonable estimate.
And we were in fact talking about Mexico, which doesn't have malaria. While Mexico has a high murder rate, for example, this does not spread virally in airplanes.
Covid's spread in warm countries is a concern for us in that it shows us covid is even more difficult to contain than we perhaps first imagined. We cannot carry on our normal lives while covid rages in Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, etc., whereas say child malnutrition in Indonesia isn't something that impact on us in that way.
That's not to say that the latter is not a terrible thing, it just doesn't represent an urgent problem for people in the UK.