The fact that malaria is so common in those areas is almost certainly a significant contributing factor to the intractable poverty in those areas.

It's hard to be productive when you are sick all the time and/or caring for someone sick.

I think the point was mostly that comparing the case/fatality numbers of covid19 - a truly global pandemic - with those of malaria has to factor in the size of the population being exposed.

Sure, Malaria is unlikely to spread like covid or it would have done so a long time ago, but the absolute numbers don't tell the whole story about how bad each disease is.

Actually malaria used to be in much larger areas of the world, including the United States. But the population was much smaller at that time.

It's a good point about absolute numbers versus population relative numbers.

Siberia used to be a giant malaria hotspot, and then it was suddenly gone at the onset of 20th century, and first semblances of effective treatment.

Some say climate change killed it, some say the extinction of a mosquito species carrying it, some better nutrition, some say quinine.