Ah yet another cant-be-true-they're-hiding-something article? Surely they can't be doing better than developed countries?
FWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indians watched UK and US struggle through a denial and late response in disbelief, like watching a car crash in slow motion.
It seems countries are learning something from the those affected earlier which is good. But there are a huge number of under counts to be seen in the all-cause mortality data.
I have my fingers crossed for everyone going through this, but only after the fact are we going to get a good idea of what happened (and that goes for Western countries too).
The entire gist of the article isn't "it can't be true they're hiding something", it's "if statistics in the West are underreported which they likely are, why on earth would one believe they're not underreported in a country with far more limited access to medical care for much of the population where deaths from respiratory diseases are far more commonplace in normal times"
India's lockdown started the day after the UK, and whilst undoubtedly the government has taken some strong measures to make the lockdown viable, it also faced unique challenges like significant parts of the urban poor population attempting to return home to families in their villages. Of course, despite being later than Western lockdowns chronologically, India's lockdown was earlier with respect to the known spread of the disease, but that in itself is a phenomena worthy of explanation.
There is no good metric for comparing test rates as well, tests per million makes no sense when a lot of states within the country have almost zero cases. India's less than 5% positive ratio on tests even in hotspot regions do not indicate a massive lack of testing.
> Comparing cases is pretty meaningless if you don't also compare test rates.
True. I'd argue that there are other factors such as demographics, time elapsed since first cases, etc.
But I guess it's hard not to. Specially for media needing to fill column inches or otherwise capture our attention :-)
It should be possible to simply look at numbers and draw any conclusions but it seems to be very difficult for human beings to do that. We feel the need create a narrative around and find an explanation for our observations.
Even if India’s number is off by 2 orders of magnitude so the number of cases were actually ~70000 (highly unlikely, since those numbers would show up in hospitalizations), that would 70,000/1.4Bn, so about 1 in 20,000.
NYC at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 1000, and the UK at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 10,000.
So even if we assume that the US and UK were not undercounting, and that India was undercounting by a factor of 100 (!), India was about half as infected as the UK and an order of magnitude less infected than NYC when it entered lockdown.
The difference between a confirmed case and all cases is that in a confirmed case is a case which has had a viral confirmation. But all cases still involves only those people who have presented for medical attention, because a case is effectively a file about a person. What is unknown is infections.
To top it, some states announced a lockdown a couple days before the country wide annoucnement. TN went into lockdown on 23rd Mar for ex. Overall, I think the local govt of some states (esply Kerala) did well by their people. However, we aren't out of risk by any measure. There are some interesting developments in the region as well. A friend in SG mentioned the 6000 odd cases of migrant workers who tested +ve in Singapore, but during the same period ICU occupancy reduced there, with only one case reaching critical condition .. and recovering. Most migrant workers in SG are from the Indian subcontinent and are generally young and healthy.
It sure feels like there are something not well understood about this virus from infection/death stats alone.
Also, there are a few factors that are in favor of India. The number of international travelers between China and India is much lesser compared to European countries. I suspect this may have played a huge role in reducing the initial exposure.
Added to that, apart from major cities, international travelers are minuscule in the general population. Consequently, the largest group of exposed citizens are from Mumbai & Delhi. Other cities are relatively less exposed.
I flew from India to the US in early February (2nd week).
Indian airports were doing thermal checks on passengers (using tech that had been installed during the Zika virus scare a few years back, I believe). The newspapers also had info about how anyone found with elevated temperatures were being asked to self quarantine, and the police was also following up.
The US had, absolutely nothing. Nada. Before the flight I was afraid that entering the US would be difficult, but it was clear (and it remained this way for over a month), that if anything, entering India, if not difficult, would actually involve checks, something that was non existent in US ports.
Further, and I don’t know if this is mentioned, the flight into India involved the cabin crew spraying some sort of pest control spray in the cabins before we landed. They mentioned it was due to regulations. Considering SARS-COV-2 has been found to have been easily killed (within minutes) of exposure to common disinfectants, could this spray have greatly minimized the virus entering the country, on baggage’s and clothing, etc?
They started doing it after SARS-COV-1 back in 2002.
The rest of the world actually respects intelligence and science (so far) but unfortunately in India it looks like the Fox-News/AM-Radio playbook is starting to win.
Similar situation here.
I travelled from Bangalore to the UK, around the first week of March, almost everyone at Bangalore airport had masks, workers had masks and gloves.
When I landed at Heathrow, not even immigration folks had masks
People in India took it seriously in the beginning
I flew into the US end of last week, more than a month since shelter in place started in many states. Still no checks of any sort. There were a couple of questions by the airline during check in but nothing after that. No questions at customs, no temperature checks.
I don't think that's disinfectant they were spraying, but rather insecticide for biosecurity. They do it on the way into Australia and New Zealand too prevent the spread of agricultural pests.
This is something that has really struck me during the Corona crisis: the misplaced Western believe of superiority towards Asian countries. I am European and I feel embarrassed about how much arrogance is displayed by some people and governments.
It started already in the beginning, when the virus was spreading rapidly in China. Reports about the failing Chinese authority were all over the place, but nobody seemed to worry that when the virus would eventually reach Europe, we would be in trouble as well. After all how could we, with our superior health system and our governments that would react quickly and rationally on such a trivial threat as this.
When the virus had reached Europe, it had already reached South Korea and Taiwan as well. These countries had learned from the earlier SARS outbreak how to deal with it and thoroughly tested everyone that could possibly have the virus, symptoms or not. The reaction I saw in the media was mostly about the breach in privacy that these measures brought. Surely this was not something that we, as enlightened Western societies, would want. And anyway, what were we frightened of. This virus could never spread so fast in Europe as it did in China, because .. Well because of what actually.
Now that the pandemic has wrecked havoc in the entire Western world and most people are realising that a strategy of first constraining the virus (like in Wuhan) and then testing everybody to contain in (like in South Korea) is the only realistic way to deal with it, one might think that a bit of humbleness towards Asia would be in place.
Think again. What we're seeing more and more instead is denial. Investigations are started if the Covid virus was manifactured in a laboratory in Wuhan for instance.
There was some interesting article about possibility that this virus is artificial. Author came to conclusion that it's possible, but there's no way to prove that (other than insider leaking strong proofs, of course). Modern virusology laboratory can create such a virus indeed and it'll be indistinguishable from a wild virus.
Unfortunately this article is in Russian, I'll provide google translate link, but it probably will be translated with errors.
I had the impression, based on news articles at the time, that local officials were behind the initial coverup in Wuhan, lasting until national officials rectified the situation.
I'm not sure local officials would be behind all the censorship and police abuse that's happened like this:
> Three Chinese citizen journalists have also gone missing after they uploaded videos showing a critical view of the situation in Wuhan to YouTube and Twitter.
> Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project.
> I had the impression, based on news articles at the time, that local officials were behind the initial coverup in Wuhan, lasting until national officials rectified the situation.
CPP propaganda strategically concentrates blame for any kind of domestic problem on local officials in order make the central authorities seem trustworthy and competent by comparison. While the local Wuhan officials definitely had an independent hand in the mismanagement, the central government had its role, too.
It's also arguable that the central government is responsible for the coverup activities by the Wuhan officials, because they're the ones who've created and sustained the system those local officials operate in.
>It's also arguable that the central government is responsible for the coverup activities by the Wuhan officials, because they're the ones who've created and sustained the system those local officials operate in.
I like this line of thinking, I think it better reflects reality then the often heard knee-jerk reaction assuming that China is an evil monolith.
I wonder sometimes why I bristle at the comments painting China as an evil monolith. They probably do the same to us. Both systems have their own ways of enriching and defending those in power.
Perhaps it is because I don't like to blame others for our problems? The US bungled tests, was late to quarantine, the feds were contradicting states, states were contradicting cities, hospitals muzzled health care workers, etc. None of that really has anything to do with China. It comes across to me as propaganda to blame them for all that!
Either Asian countries are lying because they are extremely advanced in their population centers and also authoritarian, which would be the only way for it to be news.
or
Asian countries are lying because they have the exact same organizational dysfunction as every country in 'the west', and also authoritarian, in which case it isn't news.
so which is it folks, superior technology cohesive culture and leadership, or organizational dysfunction no different from the west.
I agree with you and I’ve made the same observation but I don’t think it’s due to some misplaced sense of superiority.
I think it’s simply because it has been a while since disease and pestilence was a worry for the average Western country so the average citizen (and therefore the leaders) are complacent in a sort of “It can’t happen here” way. There have been outbreaks such as the AIDS epidemic or swine flu but nothing as impactful, infectious, and at the scale of COVID.
Whereas Asian countries have grappled with issues of SARS, Malaria, AIDS, Polio, and many more in the not so distant past and have learned the importance of taking public health seriously. The experience of the outcome of mismanaging a response to a previous epidemic is still “fresh” so to say in many of these countries. I think a good example of this is how South Korea dealt with SARS and evolved their response to COVID based on the learnings from that.
Lastly I wonder if the prevalence of more communal societies in Asian cultures make a difference. I can imagine it could make the problem worse but it could also be beneficial in the sense of providing strong societal pressures to quarantine/hand wash/social distance/etc.
Edit: And of course the misguided leaders in particular Western countries are not helping. Maybe the US this particular time is just a statistical outlier due to some mismanagement and there is nothing more to read into further than that?
> I think it’s simply because it has been a while since disease and pestilence was a worry for the average Western country so the average citizen (and therefore the leaders) are complacent in a sort of “It can’t happen here” way. There have been outbreaks such as the AIDS epidemic or swine flu but nothing as impactful, infectious, and at the scale of COVID.
I live in Kazakhstan and so far out country seems to be doing a right thing. We're heavily quarantined and I don't think that states are hiding anything. Economy implications of such a lockdown probably will be harsh, but that's a different thing. There was ill person in the building I'm living in and now entire building section just closed, nobody can go out and regular desinfections are performed (I don't think that they make any sense, but whatever).
So I'm absolutely sure that Kazakhstan is doing better than many European countries and for sure better than US. May be our government is not the most democratic one out there, but they care about citizens and their tight grip over country allows them to make an unpopular but effective decisions.
Some western people just think that they are strictly superior everywhere to the developing countries. That might be true in a lot of areas, but it's not an universal truth.
> Some western people just think that they are strictly superior everywhere to the developing countries.
The so-called western people, I'd argue, have the right mindset. I agree governments capable of draconian measures tend to do well when such behaviour control is desirable at a nationwide scale. That doesn't mean it is the only solution or even the best one.
I personally would pretty much prefer prevention, absent which, a measured, well thought-out, least disruptive policy around epidemics (I am looking at you South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam). Curtailing liberties, harsher restrictions, oppressive policing, regressive policies don't really fill me up with any sort of confidence. In fact, I worry that the citizens that are not just in acceptance of such a response, but in appraisal of it, are in for a grim reality-check when another unrest, epidemic or otherwise, rears its ugly head.
I agree with you. The condescending tone by Western media towards India is awful and disgusting.
The reality is probably that it's a combination of doing the lockdown well and the disease being far less deadly than initially thought due to very high asymptomatic infection rates. The latter is an emerging fact that the media here are in denial over. Therefore, they think India must be undercounting or something else. Awful and insulting.
BTW, in regards to US, the lockdowns here worked. NYC was the only place in the entire country that ended up getting hit bad. The rest of the nation has not been hit anywhere approaching what was predicted by models which took into account lockdowns. Outside of NYC, US statistics match Germany.
NYC certainly got hit bad, but I wouldn't say it's the only badly hit city. Here is deaths/total pop for some other cities >1mil population which I would also call "hit hard".
I'm using the per-mille (‰) rather than per-cent (%) symbol. Sorry for the confusion, but it's a more convenient unit for these quantities. This is how it'd look in percentages:
I've never seen that notation in my entire life. Learn something new every day.
Just want to point out that you didn't call that out explicitly. 99% (note that it's a percent) of people who saw your comment would see it and view it as a percent. I did, and I work with data all day every day.
It's unintentionally misleading to use notation like that without calling it out.
You're right, I should have called it out in the text. I thought ‰ was okay because I was comparing the other cities to NYC, not to an absolute value. Also, I think it's a fun symbol, and I want more english speakers to use it.
Came here to say this. When compared to the Western world, India did fare well and its not a mystery. Though the lock-downs were brutal for many Indians, they were strictly implemented and most people had the sense to follow the procedures. No denying that economic repercussions will be brutal as well but not many lives were lost. In my hometown, there isn't a single active case of COVID19 and its essentially a "green zone" now with most things returning back to normal. Local Police did a phenomenal job contact tracing and enforcing the lock-down. I wonder if life in USA would have gone back to normal by now if there was a better response and acceptance of the impending crisis. I am glad they don't have Fox news in India.
The Police, despite their shortcomings and inspite of their over-zealousness, must be commended. They really did show up for their country at the time of utmost need.
It is mainly with a sense of relief (rather than disbelief) that I watch the progression of numbers daily. The lockdown was early and quite stringent and has definitely made a difference. The most stringent lockdown has little chance of being executed effectively in India and there are innumerable cases of people cheerfully ignoring or doing so in desperation. Regardless, the awareness of COVID-19 is extremely high, probably more than any other single critical disease that afflicts us. This should have made a significant difference in influencing the behaviour of the majority. Tests are for the most part only for the symptomatic or with known contact, if asymptomatic. Almost certainly infection cases will be much, much higher. But fatalities are tough to ignore. In today's environment even a death unrelated to COVID causes consternation amongst neighbours and gets known widely. I take that to mean that the fatalities are probably close enough to reality. And that's unbelievably good and I can only hope that it doesn't get bad in the near future.
Yup, there is a very large percentage of the population, even in rural areas, that are awareof the danger posed.
Politicians, including the PM have clearly and multiple times explained their actions in a very clear and lucid language. Stateministers also have conveyed the same in a similar manner.
There was no tolerance on stupid questions from the beginning, and a huge emphasis has been put on scientists amd healthcare experts. Most of the experts also did not talk publicly, but advised the politicians.
While the reported deaths may be low, the 'they are hiding something' attitude is not helpful. India cannot do the level of testing that western countries do due to the humongous population. I can very well assure you in India you cannot hide mass deaths like China. A distant relative died of cardiac arrest and the measures were so strict that in a highly social society where paying respects to a deceased is considered a basic duty, only 5 close people were allowed. The body was directly cremated by specially appointed staff at the hospital.
While i am worried about the fact that social distancing is difficult to implement in India what has helped so far are the following measures:
1. Extremely strict lockdown - i have not gotten out of my home in more than a month, thankfully essential workers keep the essential supplies running.
2. I think BCG vaccination especially amongst young folks makes a difference and i think the immunity is higher amongst Indians (hypothesis)
3. Summer heat (hypothesis)
4. India had very early measures towards screening people coming from other countries since Jan which helped.
The cases and deaths will undoubtedly increase, however the question i have a reasonable answer to is : Do you think the best and timely measures were taken given the constraints ? Undoubtedly yes.
Ever since the outbreak happened the usual suspects have been churning out article after article about the low numbers and it seems like some of the vested interests were expecting us to lead the world in deaths instead of EU and US.
For a second the folks need to commend the work done and what was done correctly. The sacrifice of millions of Indians who are following the lockdown diligently.
As a country with limited infrastructure we cannot work without social distancing, yet somehow we have survived through this period, which is undoubtedly a miracle. This has flattened the curve and the overworked healthcare professionals have a difficult year or 2 ahead of them to ensure the no of actively infected remains manageable.
A single case of suspected swine flu was reported so fast across whatsapp and social media. People don't understand how prevalent social media is in India and think people are just dying at homes. The BBC definitely is anti-India.
People also forget that India has a lot of experience in handling epidemics. Nipha virus(2016?) was quickly reported and the spread was drastically reduced.
However, I still am afraid that India might top the list of infections overtime. Its harder for a developing country to maintain a balance between economy and lockdown.
That experience was almost exclusively only one state - Kerala, and they have also handled this one in the best manner compared to the other states in the country.
Notwithstanding that, the provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 have been invoked a lot over the years—just normally in smaller areas than the entire country as it is at present. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemic_Diseases_Act,_1897
Apparently it’s so well hidden that you have reports on it in a UK and Middle Eastern media establishment.
It’s so well hidden that it’s been discussed on the floors of the US Congress, UK parliament, and between the Indian head of state and his UK/US counterparts.
I find it fascinating that people write comments where their own evidence disproves their comment. Neither of the articles you link to even mention hidden mass deaths, and the articles’ very existence only goes to prove the point that it’s hard to hide info in India.
That’s not to say that China has been hiding a mass of dead bodies that hasn’t been reported. However, it would certainly be a lot easier to do that in China than in pretty much anywhere else in the world, especially India.
You say mass deaths are possible to hide, yet provide international sources of news.
I am an Indian, and let me tell you, if 10 people die, its a huge news. Its not possible to cover up anything in India.
You might point out about Kashmir, but Kashmir is a different case considering it had its own constitution and governance until very recently, and due to Pakistan sponsored terrorism, the state has stricter controls than the rest of India.
Is there any scientific/medical feedback on India's official approach to give prophylaxis hydroxychloroquine to medical personnel and contacts of infected people? Could it be that this policy had some positive impact?
ICMR doctor R Ganga Ketkar had made the statement on Apr 11 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP_ta25JcbU) that this is under study and at this point is not a recommended treatment.
Subsequently a recent study in the US has said that it has no positive effect. Seems to be a dead end at the moment.
Unfortunately UK government and Boris Johnson failed to take the pandemic seriously. This include BBC too. While the world was watching the kingdom with fear and awe, the establishment had a wandering attention.
Agreed re. Boris (but not about the BBC). Boris made easy decisions, not the right ones. He is expedient rather than well-judging, and he was too willing to treat politics as a game of 2 sides rather than trying to unify. Maybe he can learn from this.
on the other hand, at least one newspaper in India has an article [1] titled: "India's coronavirus infection rates are among the highest in Asia"
we are under lockdown for more than a month now, and in my state, there's even stricter lockdown for past few days (not even groceries/vegetable shops are open, supplies provided to some extent via government operated mobile vending, door deliveries, etc)
Whoever wrote that article apparently has no idea what “rate” means, as they were comparing total case and death counts:
> India is among the four Asian countries with at least 25,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 800 related deaths as of April 26. China, Turkey and Iran are the other three.
India and China each has one fifth of world’s population ffs. The infection rate in each is tiny.
Poor article, not even a single mention of the most likely reason for low death rate (apart from young population), the weather!
Strong Sun (UV light) and high humidity quickly kills the virus. Warm countries like Thailand - despite millions of tourists from Wuhan - have low death rates. In Spain cold Madrid was affected much worse than sunnier south. Summer will soon rapidly kill of the virus in southern Europe.
From the article: "Yet others talk about the possibilities of the presence of a less virulent strain of the virus in India, along with the possibility that its hot weather was diminishing the contagion. Both these claims are not backed by any evidence."
> "Both these claims are not backed by any evidence"
There is evidence for the weather claim, but it's complicated by other factors.
Multiple studies [1] have observed a correlation between weather/UV and severity of outbreak.
Wuhan, Milan, Madrid, Qom, UK, Korea and Northern USA have all fit a comparable weather profile during their outbreaks.
The problem is that this virus seems to be more durable/resilient than other seasonal viruses (flu, common cold), and even in hot climates, many people still spend a lot of time congregated in air conditioned office/residential buildings, shopping centres, public transportation systems, etc.
So it's true that hot weather alone is not enough to end an outbreak.
But it can reduce the extent/severity, and the observed evidence seems to bear that out.
Seems strange given the fact that I've seen numerous academic papers shared over the last few months indicating that hot weather and high humidity do indeed have some kind of effect on the virus's transmission.
It doesn't "kill the virus". It reduces the half life of the virus, thereby reducing the time it has to spread from surfaces. This means the virus is less transmissible.
That alone cannot explain why deaths / infections ratio is low in India compared to the west. There are many hypothesis:
- Higher testing in India
- BCG vaccine immunity.
None of these have been scientifically validated yet.
Plenty of warm areas are being hit hard, but a lot of warm countries have "reporting issues" (look at the excess deaths in Jakarta for an example). Heat might lower R0 by some amount but it's still way above 1 without measures
There's also strong correlation inside the same countries regarding the more sun = less deaths vs less sun = more deaths. The best examples that I can give are Italy, where Rome and everything South of of it has ridden the pandemic wave pretty ok (with the slight exception of the region of Puglia) and Spain, where the region of Andalusia in the South has had only a 5% or so excess in the number of deaths for this year
I can give some ground level information. I live in a very densely populated street (total length is just two hundred meters, my guess is at least a thousand people live here). No one is dying here without others noticing. Further, there's a great amount of scrutiny into whether anyone's sick (see the reports of doctors getting beaten up even by the cops).
As far as I know, no one has died in this street in a month. The ambulance hasn't entered the street either. So unless there's a great conspiracy which most of us in the street are unaware, there really doesn't seem to be that many deaths. In fact the death rate is lower than normal, when people normally die, the first ritual is the blowing of a very loud horn in front of their house for an entire day. Haven't heard that in weeks. I live in the middle of the fifth biggest city in the country as well. It's likely many people in the street already have this but it's very unlikely that many or any have died from covid.
For reference, official disease tally for my city is now 570 cases.
Few isolated incidents mostly in slum areas where rumors spread of a government conspiracy of targeting muslims. This government's anti-minority image did not help.
> The Taliban began assassinating polio workers the year after the CIA used a vaccination campaign for hepatitis B, not polio, to identify Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad.
> There has been opposition to such immunisation drives from some powerful clerics while a fake CIA vaccination campaign, which helped to locate Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, is thought to have had a detrimental effect as well.
Yeah but it's quite a leap from polio vaccinators getting waxed and Shakil Afridi being jailed to "Doctors have a bad reputation in Pakistan" and then imply it's because it's a Muslim country. Many (even conservative) parents send their daughters to publicly financed medical colleges often to increase their marriage prospects. Does that sound like a thing they would do if doctors had a bad rap? Doctors came out and criticized the clerics for lack of adherence to social distancing, I didn't see anyone call them un-Islamic for standing their ground.
And to be clear, I'm not arguing that he was murdered. I was just pointing out that some Muslims consider that he was murdered. I mean, the doctor who led the CIA to him is still in jail, and likely will be for the rest of his life. And the lawyer who defended him was murdered by the Taliban.
It's very stupid, but a (very) few people see them as potential spreaders of the disease. Public health workers going into the community to find infected people have also been attacked. Also, until recently, suspected COVID patients had to be in hospital -- no home isolation allowed -- and some of these patients (or their relatives) thought that venting their anger on doctors would help.
Unfortunately, the law of large numbers in India means that a "very few" can mean tens of thousands of people.
> a (very) few people see them as potential spreaders
One problem is that although only a very few will see it this way, other people would be cautious about being caught up in it. This could affect the way they behave because if they think that somebody died in their house from this disease then they won't want to advertise that at all (eg by blowing horns) in case they were subsequently targeted. The fear is likely worse than the reality but behavior like this is driven more by fear.
However I can understand that ramraj07 says it seems unlikely on their street as it would surely be difficult in a close community to hide a van coming to take Auntie-ji away.
In North American long term care facilities, this is exactly what's happening. In Canada, a ban was put in place to prevent health workers from working in multiple long term care facilities - it was found that infectious material was making its way via health workers from one home to another, all full of high risk populations.
Add in the fact that many hospitals in North America are short on PPE, and some are even preventing nurses and care personnelle from wearing PPE (or to bring their own, etc) - and you can see how much of an issue this can be.
Of course, beating up the doctors is a bad idea, but the roots of the idea that health workers are potential spreaders isn't all that far fetched.
I'm guessing you live in Hyderabad. Clearly your street is not a hotspot, and you really shouldn't be extrapolating from it to the rest of India. As far as people having it while being asymptomatic, that is unfalsifiable until they are tested.
Don't think I mentioned anything to generalize. Just what I observed in my city (Chennai) in my street.
What I was implying is that perhaps things did go okay in terms of slowing the spread in India: of course, there's probably more spread than is being reported, but that seems par for course everywhere.
I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks.
> I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks.
Sorry, what? The lockdown isn't about the rich or the poor. It is mostly about containing a deadly disease we don't fully understand yet. It is for the medics but also mostly to keep the social fabric intact. No one wants this to descent into chaos and madness without controls in-place. A deliberated and measured response is warranted despite an unprecedented loss of livelihood and absence of any real infrastructure to handle the fallout, especially to support the 500m people who live on daily-wages. Unless an effective prophylactic or a therapeutic treatment is discovered, lifting the lockdown can be disastrous for a country as dense as India and for incubation periods as long as they are for a rabidly contagious SARS-CoV-2.
Hopefully, the current situation improves in a month (most cities and states could possibly reopen in the coming weeks), but I wish the conversation around UBI (food subsidies including) and universal healthcare picks up steam rather than the pathetic pettiness around religious faultlines that seems to be in focus, all the time, aided by the ruling party's inclination to make a mockery out of democracy and India's minorities. I digress.
>> I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks.
> Sorry, what? The lockdown isn't about rich or poor.
I think you misunderstood the parent comment. They are worried that the poor will be more negatively effected by the lockdown than by the coronavirus, in contrast to the rich. This has been observed in other countries, where the poor have had no way to sustain themselves without work, whereas the rich can just hide inside and wait it out without a problem.
> I think you misunderstood the parent comment... the poor will be more negatively effected by the lockdown than by the coronavirus, in contrast to the rich.
GP said and I quote, "at the expense of the rich", which, to me, implies that somehow the rich are conspiring to persist with the lockdown. The families reliant on dialy-wages have always had massive problems in terms of education, healthcare, food, and shelter, and it isn't something the pandemic has birthed though it has aggravated it. There exists central and state government schemes to address these issues, but I wish there was a more systemic, consorted, and uniform approach to it with UBI and universal healthcare, instead.
It sounds like you're taking the opportunity, a grammatical error in the op's comment, to be combative and argumentative. Now you're just being dismissive of the plight of others and using your command of the language to minimize the situation.
The pandemic and quarantine haven't just aggravated an untenable situation, they're pushing it to the limits. The poor can't afford to not work, the rich can afford to remain in lock down. It's happening everywhere, not just in India.
There are those of us who can afford to be out of work for a long time, and there are those of us who can continue to work while maintaining quarantine, however there is a significant portion of the population that has run out of reserves and must work to live. These are people driving trucks, delivering packages, stocking shelves, generally putting themselves at risk while enabling the wealthy to remain quarantined.
> It sounds like you're taking the opportunity... to be combative and argumentative.
I'm sorry it comes off like that. My intention was to point out that this situation isn't of advantage to anyone regardless of their social or economic standing. Sure, a lockdown is harsher on some people than the others, but life, in general, is harsher on some people more than on the others.
The pandemic is doing a great job at ringing the alarm bells. I hope it stirs the government and the policy makers into action and not use it instead for abhorrent religious and political mileage at the expense of steering away from building a support framework for all its citizens.
> ...using your command of the language to minimize the situation.
I'm not the one mentally replacing at the expense of with in contrast to.
> The pandemic and quarantine haven't just aggravated an untenable situation, they're pushing it to the limits.
You'd find that we are in agreement. I don't understand what part of my comment made you think I'm cold to their struggles.
> I don't understand what part of my comment made you think I'm cold to their struggles.
As I said, it's the minimizing choice of language and your choice to ignore a grammatical error.
> I'm not the one mentally replacing at the expense of with in contrast to.
As I said before you're ignoring the grammatical errors in that sentence and paraphrasing to suit your argument.
> GP said and I quote, "at the expense of the rich",
That isn't what was said. The full quote:
> I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks.
Which is grammatically incorrect and doesn't make sense. However given the context and the structure of the sentence it's hard to draw the conclusion that you did. Rather, it's more likely the op mean to say something like:
> I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse than richer folks.
But some how you've interpreted it to mean that the richer are willing to accept some self harm if it means harming poor communities?
Fwiw, I didn't somehow interpret it purposefully in any sinsiter way or choose to ignore an error to start an argument. For some reason, that's just how I read it.
>>the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks.
In such situations that is always the case. If there is a lockdown, poor will suffer financially. If no lockdown, poor will be exposed to the infection more than others since they have to be out working.
It’s not your fault. This kind of positive outcome just isn’t acceptable to a lot of people so they’re going to at best claim you’re the exception and at worst that you’re fudging the numbers.
Today’s fashion is drama and any not hysteric action must end in doom and gloom.
My own personal experience : A close relative passed away in a large city early April (of pneumonia caused by COVID-19) complications. His entire family was interviewed for 2 hours and all contacts were screened - the family and some of the contacts were also put in quarantine and tested. The names of my relative and others who tested positive were put in the papers the next day (name, address etc) after the test, to help identify people who may be may have come in contact. This is obviously anecdotal - but i have so far seen the opposite of hiding data - some places are revealing too much rather than too little information.
But India has a federal structure, different states may have different policies. It is pointless to make one statement about the whole country, especially when the numbers are coming from states, not the center.
570 official cases in the city would mean 5-20 deaths. You most lokely wouldn’t noce those deaths on your street unless the street has 20% of the popularion of the city.
Never say never, but when I say crowded small street, I definitely mean it, nothing larger than a tote bag moves without gossip spreading, unless maybe at 3 am. So, perhaps? But I wouldn't bet much money on it personally! We will know in a few weeks though, if people are dying in our street, given the absolute lack of any distancing measures inside the streets (lockdown is only at a block level), more people should get very sick very soon.. hope not.
There are some numbers which simply don't make any sense.
Take today's data:
Delhi - 3,314 cases. (likely to go up as data is updated for tonight). Total population of Delhi is 19 Million.
Rajasthan - 2,438 cases. Total population: 68.9 Million
Haryana - 311 cases. Total population: 25.4 Million
Haryana has less than 10% of Delhi's covid case numbers while being a much larger state and while sharing a big border with both Delhi and Rajasthan where the covid cases are much higher. Also, huge numbers of people travel between Haryana and Delhi on a daily basis. Haryana's numbers make no sense.
Uttar Pradesh - 2,134 cases. Total population: 204 Million
About 30% less than Delhi while being much, much larger than Delhi and sharing a huge border with Delhi with vast numbers of people travelling to and from Delhi! Uttar Pradesh numbers too seem heavily under reported.
Bihar - 403 cases. Total population: 99 Million
Bihar has much, much lower covid cases than even Uttar Pradesh when Uttar Pradesh's numbers were themselves already suspiciously low. Bihar shares a huge border with Uttar Pradesh and there is simply no way Bihar with a much poorer healthcare infrastructure can have such low covid numbers.
Both UP and Bihar has huge numbers of migrants working in Delhi, Mumbai etc which makes these numbers even more dubious.
So on the face of it, there are big issues with these numbers being put out by some of the biggest states in India. If these numbers were more accurate, the overall figures for covid cases from India will be much higher.
India shares a massive border with China and is right next to China while having almost the same number of covid cases as Peru - which is halfway across the world from China and which is relatively shielded from the rest of the world in comparison to India - in terms of number of travellers coming in etc.
Anecdotally I know ex-colleagues who got Covid19 in the US and one of them has died.
I literally know of no one who is sick, much less with covid19, here in India in my friend circle, in my family circle and across the 1000+ employee company I work in. Either there's asymptomatic sick in my circle or no one has it.
Granted I am anxious, and hope things don't get worse, but international media has been pathetic on reporting this. I like the work that local The Print is doing. Very informative reporting from them - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuyRsHZILrU7ZDIAbGASHdA
For eg, the last video compares deaths vs testing in a poor country like Bolivia — situated many miles away from global hotspots to that of Belgium's — one of Europe's headquarters. It seems to suggest that increase in testing and quick isolation is somewhat of a "subjective" factor and doesn't help India.
This, completely disregarding factors like geography, demographics, Bolivia's first case landing a month after Belgium's, and Belgium being one of the few countries in Europe to actually count non-hospital deaths and more.
I don't think that was ever the argument. Increased testing has been recommended by the WHO, has noticeably helped prevent a bigger outbreak impact in South Korea & Germany and quick isolation makes a lot of sense for a disease that is asymptomatic in most patients.
So, the conclusion of the article is “we know that we don't know”? One has to wonder, what is the point of publishing something useless like this, unless the author is trying to imply something completely different in the subtext.
Based on how many people of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent are dying in the UK there is no indication that people form the Indian subcontinent have some genetic resiliency or immunity to the virus.
Also, how quickly the cases have been spreading through Singaporean's Foreign Worker Dormitories. I believe at some point, there were more Bangladeshis confirmed infected in Singapore than in Bangladesh.
SARS and MERS did not provide immunity against each other nor against SARS2.
There is no indication that other common coronavirus infections such as those that cause 10-30% of common cold cases world wide provide any immunity to the current virus.
Also given the sheer size of India it’s unlikely that there would be a pathogen that provides immunity on this scale that would not have been identified previously since it would end up causing complications and deaths in some infections even if at much lower rates than previous epidemics.
If it also managed to spread across India It would’ve also spread worldwide.
Lastly like someone else mentioned migrants native to the region where hit pretty hard everywhere else.
Indian, living in India presently, who lived in the US for almost a decade. I can relate a strange experience: I was never severely bedridden by flu or viral fever in India. I caught the flu during my stay in the US one February. I was so weak I could not even sit up in a chair for more than 15 minutes, I would doze off. I was in my bed for practically 5 days, was weak for a couple of weeks afterwards.
I am back in India for a decade, never had such an experience again.
As you say, genetics is definitely not the reason for immunity or lower death rates. But I wonder whether human immunity is much lower coming out of the winter. India does not have severe subzero celsius winter except in the hills.
Because you are likely more resilient to local strains.
Getting a flu / cold or the "shits" when traveling is very common, many westerners that travel to india and suffer some gastric discomfort blame the food for no real reason (tho ghee can have a cleansing effect if you over eat it).
Could this be related to your levels of Vitamin D. I am not a doctor but since this pandemic, I have read some articles that suggests that people with black/brown skin need a lot more exposure to the sun to get good levels of Vitamin D with the situation getting worse during winter. That coupled with your stay in a colder country could have been the reason.
They dont even mention other options such as previous vaccinations, cross effects from other drugs, antibodies from other coronaviruses , humidity/sunlight etc. "They must be hiding something" means they either believe it's a conspiracy, or is a borderline racist attitude
About relative low death counts in some Asian countries by comparison with Europe or America, we must take in mind that Asian people could had been exposed in the past to a virus of Asian origin (or to a relatively similar virus strain), so they could have developed some immunity previously.
I would want to include in the discussion (and this is just my opinion and wild speculation by my part, not more, not less) the spring wildfires around Chernobyl area also in 2020. I wonder if ashes in the atmosphere are being also a hidden source of respiratory problems for Europe than nobody is taking in mind. Could explain the strange pattern of people that has recovered from the disease but somehow falls ill again and starts coughing again and again in waves, malaria style.
I remember similar massive coughs in all Europe in 2015 (if I'm not wrong) exactly at the same time that Russian and Ukrainian armies were burning forests in the North of Ukranie. I can be wrong, but there is not much to lose by researching that except time, and we have a lot currently. If we seen that spikes in hospital admissions match the burning periods and the wind direction plus a reasonable delay to reach the areas we could do further research.
Looking at the Spanish flu - it looks that if one were to account for famine, malnutrition, unsanitary conditions and other facts, it seems nothing out of the ordinary.
I generally have a very poor opinion of the govt officials in my country owing to some very bad past experiences in India. But this time I too was pleasantly surprised.
My friend lives in a very populated area in Delhi called Tilak nagar and he told me in feb end iirc that the house opposite his has a huge plaque on it that says *Quarantine, this house has a covid patient" put on by police. This was the time when nobody knew how serious this thing was. So yeah it does seem they got some things right too this time.
Similar in my Apartment. An air hostess got quarantined for 14 days in her house with a big poster on outside door “ Flat under Quarantine “. It was not Red colour because it was not confirmed case. So basically National Disaster Mechanism are quite well planned and implemented.
A better question from everyone outside the US: what the flying f is with the huuuuuge (accounting for estimated no. of infected and other factors) number of deaths in the USA??!!?!
I mean, the US is (a) a developed country with modern health-care, (b) there is no common 'old parents living in same home with some of the adult children' situation you have in Italy + Eastern Europe, (c) there are no norms of common physical contact like 'kissing on meeting' (see France, Italy, northern Romania etc.), (d) the population is generally very dispersed (compare US density with areas of Western Europe or China) and (e) there is prevalent use of personal cars instead of public transport (as opposed to Western Europe and China, again), which should further diminish transmission.
US stats look worrying for everyone on Earth, it almost looks like a wild difference in viral strains or some other important but unknown factor.
Whilst I agree the USA has a lower population density than most of the world it is not exactly true. This figure assumes everyone is equally spread out. However many inhabitants of the USA live in cities therefore population density is much higher. The same thing happens in Spain which goes from one of the least dense countries in Europe to one of the most dense looking at it in these different ways.
The USA has a large population and I assume this is why you think the numbers are huge. Deaths per thousand are around a half of the UK and less than a third of Italy and Spain.
In not very worried by US stats they seem fairly similar to elsewhere in the world. What I'm worried about is that it seems like American politicians, media, people think they are much further along infection than they are.
Not only is the population large, a lot of people are large as well. Obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular health are huge factors in covid-19 mortality.
Since the very beginning, everyone expected the US to have a very high percentage of death (remember discussing that my friends even before the US had a single casuality).
Hypertension and diabetes were listed as have a lot of impact of the mortality rates, and the general extremely bad health of the american population, coupled with the lack of a quality public health system made it the perfect target.
That, plus more political issues, such as not being able to enforce curfew easily, a general mistrust in representatives, and a president that remained convinced it wasn't such a big deal for a very long time.
All in all, i think the number remain quite low compared to the worst case scenario.
> A better question from everyone outside the US: what the flying f is with the huuuuuge (accounting for estimated no. of infected and other factors) number of deaths in the USA??!!?
That's only true if you don't know what "per capita" means.
So far the US has 172 death per 1M population. That's better than other countries with supposedly better healthcare including:
- Belgium
- France
- Spain
- Italy
- UK
- Netherlands
- Sweden
- Ireland
- Switzerland
And many more.
> US stats look worrying for everyone on Earth
I'm more worried about people's inability to understand the difference between stats and absolute numbers specially on this site where we're supposed to know better.
The thing that worries me about NYC statistics is that they're awful, and we now have serum tests that indicate that -- at best -- we're about 1/3 of the way through. (Current serum tests indicate 20-25% of NYC has caught it, current R0 estimates indicate that 70-85% would need to catch it for it to burn itself out without any additional measures.)
This puts reasonable estimates of "how bad can it get?" at north of 5000 deaths per million, if we don't properly contain it. This, really, is the new information we're getting out of US numbers.
Community of Madrid looks to be at 1228, based on official statistics.
There are other place also doing poorly, some as badly as NYC, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse, but right now, until someone screws up worse, NYC is currently in the running for "worst COVID-19 death rate in a major city".
I think it would be more honest if US statistics would be split per state or social/economic region otherwise you I would complain that you also are in the same catherogy with the ones you accuse.
What I always think of if I hear this is the tallness paradox between Europe and USA. When controlling for ethnicity, the modern white person from the US is on average about 1.5 inches (4 cm) shorter than the average person from the EU. As far as I know its uncertain why exactly this is (american used to be taller until mid of the last century) but the usual suspect is class inequality the lets to poorer sanitation for poorer people which in turn are also more likely to infect richer people which leads to less growth in adolescents. But ultimately, the cause of this phenomenon in not known.
There are differences in vaccine regimen too, which lead to be a statistically significant factor.
(edit) The first point is in reference to the BCG hypothesis, search at MedRHiv for similar entries such as:
Correlation between universal BCG vaccination policy and reduced morbidity and mortality for COVID-19"
In addition to early travel exposure, common travelling, social factors-vs-car culture, obesity and diabetes, etc.
Within Europe, the BCG hypothesis seems a differentiating factor, though further studies are necessary. The reason for the effect of the vaccine are not currently known.
The US has a low rate of testing, was late to impose lockdowns (mostly; a few states were fairly proactive), and is bad at enforcing them (again, mostly). Having a leader who spent the first few weeks of the crisis on TV denying there was a problem, _while people were already dying in the US_, probably didn't help; most countries don't have that.
> some other important but unknown factor
The important factor is probably just very poor crisis management. US death rates aren't _that_ high, anyway; on paper they're low to medium vs Europe, though given that the rate of testing is lower than almost anywhere in Western Europe that's probably understated.
In the state of India that I live in, at least three people have died in the hospital of very Covid-19-like symptoms, but they were not counted as Covid-19 deaths.
Two of double pneumonia, both with travel history, but their tests came up negative. They were both healthy until very recently. One had arrived from the US, where the chances of community-acquiring-pneumonia are low as I gather.
One of cardiac arrest, but AFAIK she wasn't tested because she had no travel history.
We shouldn't be including deaths in the Covid-19 total just because they involve similar symptoms. Lots of other problems cause pneumonia and cardiac arrest, and you said yourself that the pneumonia patients tested negative. Apparently healthy people die suddenly all the time, sadly.
The RT-PCR test apparently has a very high false negative rate; I've read up to 30% or even 40%.
Also, they had all the other symptoms as well including fever and shortness of breath. One arrived in India with respiratory distress. The other fell ill a week after visiting a Covid hotspot -- Mumbai -- which he managed to visit despite a travel ban because he was a hotshot politician.
Where did you read that? Was it a reputable source that cited peer-reviewed data? We use RT-PCR every single day at our company (vaccine development) and we couldn't do our jobs if it performed so abysmally. The RT-PCR is the gold standard when it comes to detection.
Sorry, I should have qualified that fully. I meant clinical sensitivity for RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 for samples drawn from throat swabs, specifically. I know that my local hospital is only taking throat swabs, not nasal swabs; and all the press photos I've seen for testing in India is of throat swabs.
Well, then that's not really the RT-PCR that's at fault, its the way the disease presents itself, that makes it difficult to find a reliable point of sampling. Although, I can see how in casual conversation one might say that the RT-PCR test isn't reliable.
Another biased hit-piece by BBC against India. The same BBC published a glowing love letter to Jack Ma, ignoring the fact that China's secretive and callous approach is what has put us in this situation.
I would like to point out that even with the existing amount of tests, that are much lower in number than those in the USA and Europe, the COVID19 test positivity rate in India is among the lowest in the world (4-5%).
It's not just COVID-19 deaths, raw death numbers (as measured by death certificates, you cannot cremate/bury people without one) are down as well -- this report has some evidence, including lower business in at crematoriums[1]. This is likely due to the very stringent lockdown in India, and the somewhat underrated fact that traffic collisions and accidents kill huge numbers of people every day in India.
That said, while lower death rates (India's seem to be about half of the world's death rate) are to be celebrated, there are confounding factors.
1) The reported death count are mostly hospital deaths only. Home deaths aren't counted.
2) As the article notes, mis-diagnosing is a problem especially outside hospitals.
But if there's something that genuinely is reducing the death rate, then that's obviously a huge opportunity to study and learn from.
Is that not normally the case? The pp says that every burial or cremation requires a death certificate, and who else but the authorities has the right to issue a death certificate?
The process for getting a death certificate usually takes a couple of weeks to a month or so. And normally, for natural deaths, there is nothing to be reported to anyone.
But during lockdown, reporting is to be done immediately.
Ground Report : I live in one of the major cities. Lockdown is reasonably well ensured. Our State Chief Minister was particularly vigilant and people are very alert.
There is not much misinformation in the media.
Basically, everyone has taken it seriously and is vigilant.
I also hear that those who took TB vaccine are more immune, and that is practically most of the younger and middle aged people in the country.
Maybe it’s because Americans are fat. Especially poor Americans who subsist on fast food and other junk. My guess would be that Indians in poverty are more likely starving than diabetic. Starving has its own health risks obviously, but being fat enough to impede your breathing isn’t one of them.
Obesity affects fatality rates, not infection rates, due to greater chance of respiratory obstruction in advanced cases of the disease.
It appears that infection rates in India are low at the moment. It's not entirely clear why, but it could be a combination of hot weather, their nationally imposed lockdown, and lack of testing.
Unlike what this article tries to subtly hint, there is no massive conspiracy theory stuff going on here. There are too many people in India (with smartphones and cameras and 3G/4G internet) to pull off anything covert. No one here views this as mystery but as a result of country's discipline in lockdown till now.
The country imposed an early screening and tight lockdown and people followed it well till now.
> Unlike what this article tries to subtly hint, there is no massive conspiracy theory stuff going on here. There are too many people in India (with smartphones and cameras and 3G/4G internet) to pull off anything covert.
So you're saying there's no 5G?
Jokes aside, I would love a breakdown of all different hypotheses here and to revisit them in one year. (Eg therapies, heat/humidity effects, lockdown severity, lockdown timing, genetic factors, strain variations, etc)
No news channel is unbiased these days but I don't know of any other news source that has as much criticism as BBC. They have a long history[1] of spreading misinformation and hate aginst many countries (specially India).
Hey, guys I'm from India. There is a very strict lock down here. It has been there for a long time now. My city (Bangalore) did the lockdown a bit early. Like one more comment down this thread, there will be really loud horns in front of houses. That has not been going on around here.
380 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadFWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indians watched UK and US struggle through a denial and late response in disbelief, like watching a car crash in slow motion.
I have my fingers crossed for everyone going through this, but only after the fact are we going to get a good idea of what happened (and that goes for Western countries too).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
Source: https://www.covid19india.org/
So many keystrokes and clicked bait on something nobody has any concrete insight into.
India's lockdown started the day after the UK, and whilst undoubtedly the government has taken some strong measures to make the lockdown viable, it also faced unique challenges like significant parts of the urban poor population attempting to return home to families in their villages. Of course, despite being later than Western lockdowns chronologically, India's lockdown was earlier with respect to the known spread of the disease, but that in itself is a phenomena worthy of explanation.
When UK went in to lockdown, it had 6700 cases. (23rd March) [2]
When India went in to lockdown, it had 657 cases. (25th March) [2]
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/20/politics/new-york-workfor... [2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
True. I'd argue that there are other factors such as demographics, time elapsed since first cases, etc. But I guess it's hard not to. Specially for media needing to fill column inches or otherwise capture our attention :-) It should be possible to simply look at numbers and draw any conclusions but it seems to be very difficult for human beings to do that. We feel the need create a narrative around and find an explanation for our observations.
NYC at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 1000, and the UK at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 10,000.
So even if we assume that the US and UK were not undercounting, and that India was undercounting by a factor of 100 (!), India was about half as infected as the UK and an order of magnitude less infected than NYC when it entered lockdown.
It sure feels like there are something not well understood about this virus from infection/death stats alone.
Added to that, apart from major cities, international travelers are minuscule in the general population. Consequently, the largest group of exposed citizens are from Mumbai & Delhi. Other cities are relatively less exposed.
Indian airports were doing thermal checks on passengers (using tech that had been installed during the Zika virus scare a few years back, I believe). The newspapers also had info about how anyone found with elevated temperatures were being asked to self quarantine, and the police was also following up.
The US had, absolutely nothing. Nada. Before the flight I was afraid that entering the US would be difficult, but it was clear (and it remained this way for over a month), that if anything, entering India, if not difficult, would actually involve checks, something that was non existent in US ports.
Further, and I don’t know if this is mentioned, the flight into India involved the cabin crew spraying some sort of pest control spray in the cabins before we landed. They mentioned it was due to regulations. Considering SARS-COV-2 has been found to have been easily killed (within minutes) of exposure to common disinfectants, could this spray have greatly minimized the virus entering the country, on baggage’s and clothing, etc?
ref. https://www.cdc.gov/features/pesticides-aircraft/index.html
That is why bed bugs have become resistant to it
When I landed at Heathrow, not even immigration folks had masks
People in India took it seriously in the beginning
It started already in the beginning, when the virus was spreading rapidly in China. Reports about the failing Chinese authority were all over the place, but nobody seemed to worry that when the virus would eventually reach Europe, we would be in trouble as well. After all how could we, with our superior health system and our governments that would react quickly and rationally on such a trivial threat as this.
When the virus had reached Europe, it had already reached South Korea and Taiwan as well. These countries had learned from the earlier SARS outbreak how to deal with it and thoroughly tested everyone that could possibly have the virus, symptoms or not. The reaction I saw in the media was mostly about the breach in privacy that these measures brought. Surely this was not something that we, as enlightened Western societies, would want. And anyway, what were we frightened of. This virus could never spread so fast in Europe as it did in China, because .. Well because of what actually.
Now that the pandemic has wrecked havoc in the entire Western world and most people are realising that a strategy of first constraining the virus (like in Wuhan) and then testing everybody to contain in (like in South Korea) is the only realistic way to deal with it, one might think that a bit of humbleness towards Asia would be in place. Think again. What we're seeing more and more instead is denial. Investigations are started if the Covid virus was manifactured in a laboratory in Wuhan for instance.
Unfortunately this article is in Russian, I'll provide google translate link, but it probably will be translated with errors.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3...
GP is right, that you hardly hear it in the news.
> Three Chinese citizen journalists have also gone missing after they uploaded videos showing a critical view of the situation in Wuhan to YouTube and Twitter.
https://qz.com/1816219/chinese-internet-rallied-to-save-a-ce...
> Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project.
https://qz.com/1846277/china-arrests-users-behind-github-cor...
CPP propaganda strategically concentrates blame for any kind of domestic problem on local officials in order make the central authorities seem trustworthy and competent by comparison. While the local Wuhan officials definitely had an independent hand in the mismanagement, the central government had its role, too.
It's also arguable that the central government is responsible for the coverup activities by the Wuhan officials, because they're the ones who've created and sustained the system those local officials operate in.
I like this line of thinking, I think it better reflects reality then the often heard knee-jerk reaction assuming that China is an evil monolith.
I wonder sometimes why I bristle at the comments painting China as an evil monolith. They probably do the same to us. Both systems have their own ways of enriching and defending those in power.
Perhaps it is because I don't like to blame others for our problems? The US bungled tests, was late to quarantine, the feds were contradicting states, states were contradicting cities, hospitals muzzled health care workers, etc. None of that really has anything to do with China. It comes across to me as propaganda to blame them for all that!
Either Asian countries are lying because they are extremely advanced in their population centers and also authoritarian, which would be the only way for it to be news.
or
Asian countries are lying because they have the exact same organizational dysfunction as every country in 'the west', and also authoritarian, in which case it isn't news.
so which is it folks, superior technology cohesive culture and leadership, or organizational dysfunction no different from the west.
I think it’s simply because it has been a while since disease and pestilence was a worry for the average Western country so the average citizen (and therefore the leaders) are complacent in a sort of “It can’t happen here” way. There have been outbreaks such as the AIDS epidemic or swine flu but nothing as impactful, infectious, and at the scale of COVID.
Whereas Asian countries have grappled with issues of SARS, Malaria, AIDS, Polio, and many more in the not so distant past and have learned the importance of taking public health seriously. The experience of the outcome of mismanaging a response to a previous epidemic is still “fresh” so to say in many of these countries. I think a good example of this is how South Korea dealt with SARS and evolved their response to COVID based on the learnings from that.
Lastly I wonder if the prevalence of more communal societies in Asian cultures make a difference. I can imagine it could make the problem worse but it could also be beneficial in the sense of providing strong societal pressures to quarantine/hand wash/social distance/etc.
Edit: And of course the misguided leaders in particular Western countries are not helping. Maybe the US this particular time is just a statistical outlier due to some mismanagement and there is nothing more to read into further than that?
I agree that this is the main factor. Consequently I proposed the concept of the "civilization immune system" to explain how it works: https://www.sonyasupposedly.com/civilizational-immune-system...
So I'm absolutely sure that Kazakhstan is doing better than many European countries and for sure better than US. May be our government is not the most democratic one out there, but they care about citizens and their tight grip over country allows them to make an unpopular but effective decisions.
Some western people just think that they are strictly superior everywhere to the developing countries. That might be true in a lot of areas, but it's not an universal truth.
The so-called western people, I'd argue, have the right mindset. I agree governments capable of draconian measures tend to do well when such behaviour control is desirable at a nationwide scale. That doesn't mean it is the only solution or even the best one.
I personally would pretty much prefer prevention, absent which, a measured, well thought-out, least disruptive policy around epidemics (I am looking at you South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam). Curtailing liberties, harsher restrictions, oppressive policing, regressive policies don't really fill me up with any sort of confidence. In fact, I worry that the citizens that are not just in acceptance of such a response, but in appraisal of it, are in for a grim reality-check when another unrest, epidemic or otherwise, rears its ugly head.
Considering behaviour of American population to the lax government measures, I guess strong laws/measures are the way to go.
1. https://www.lawfareblog.com/lessons-america-how-south-korean...
The reality is probably that it's a combination of doing the lockdown well and the disease being far less deadly than initially thought due to very high asymptomatic infection rates. The latter is an emerging fact that the media here are in denial over. Therefore, they think India must be undercounting or something else. Awful and insulting.
BTW, in regards to US, the lockdowns here worked. NYC was the only place in the entire country that ended up getting hit bad. The rest of the nation has not been hit anywhere approaching what was predicted by models which took into account lockdowns. Outside of NYC, US statistics match Germany.
NYC: 1.07‰
New Orleans: 0.65‰
Detroit: 0.60‰
Boston: 0.44‰
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/corona...
NYC: 0.107%
New Orleans: 0.065%
Detroit: 0.060%
Boston: 0.044%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mille
Just want to point out that you didn't call that out explicitly. 99% (note that it's a percent) of people who saw your comment would see it and view it as a percent. I did, and I work with data all day every day.
It's unintentionally misleading to use notation like that without calling it out.
Just type "per mille" next time.
Politicians, including the PM have clearly and multiple times explained their actions in a very clear and lucid language. Stateministers also have conveyed the same in a similar manner.
There was no tolerance on stupid questions from the beginning, and a huge emphasis has been put on scientists amd healthcare experts. Most of the experts also did not talk publicly, but advised the politicians.
While i am worried about the fact that social distancing is difficult to implement in India what has helped so far are the following measures:
1. Extremely strict lockdown - i have not gotten out of my home in more than a month, thankfully essential workers keep the essential supplies running. 2. I think BCG vaccination especially amongst young folks makes a difference and i think the immunity is higher amongst Indians (hypothesis) 3. Summer heat (hypothesis) 4. India had very early measures towards screening people coming from other countries since Jan which helped.
The cases and deaths will undoubtedly increase, however the question i have a reasonable answer to is : Do you think the best and timely measures were taken given the constraints ? Undoubtedly yes.
Ever since the outbreak happened the usual suspects have been churning out article after article about the low numbers and it seems like some of the vested interests were expecting us to lead the world in deaths instead of EU and US.
For a second the folks need to commend the work done and what was done correctly. The sacrifice of millions of Indians who are following the lockdown diligently.
As a country with limited infrastructure we cannot work without social distancing, yet somehow we have survived through this period, which is undoubtedly a miracle. This has flattened the curve and the overworked healthcare professionals have a difficult year or 2 ahead of them to ensure the no of actively infected remains manageable.
However, I still am afraid that India might top the list of infections overtime. Its harder for a developing country to maintain a balance between economy and lockdown.
If you rightly don't want people taking an unhelpful attitude towards India, try not to do the same yourself about other countries.
LOL..
What happens internally in India, is not my concern. But to say this, is disingenuous.
Don’t you have a little Muslim rebellion going on over there? With intense media and Internet blackouts?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8256349/Indias-Musl...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/india-restores-intern...
It’s so well hidden that it’s been discussed on the floors of the US Congress, UK parliament, and between the Indian head of state and his UK/US counterparts.
I find it fascinating that people write comments where their own evidence disproves their comment. Neither of the articles you link to even mention hidden mass deaths, and the articles’ very existence only goes to prove the point that it’s hard to hide info in India.
That’s not to say that China has been hiding a mass of dead bodies that hasn’t been reported. However, it would certainly be a lot easier to do that in China than in pretty much anywhere else in the world, especially India.
I am an Indian, and let me tell you, if 10 people die, its a huge news. Its not possible to cover up anything in India.
You might point out about Kashmir, but Kashmir is a different case considering it had its own constitution and governance until very recently, and due to Pakistan sponsored terrorism, the state has stricter controls than the rest of India.
https://www.mohfw.gov.in/pdf/AdvisoryontheuseofHydroxychloro...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Subsequently a recent study in the US has said that it has no positive effect. Seems to be a dead end at the moment.
we are under lockdown for more than a month now, and in my state, there's even stricter lockdown for past few days (not even groceries/vegetable shops are open, supplies provided to some extent via government operated mobile vending, door deliveries, etc)
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/data/indias-coronavirus-infection-r...
> India is among the four Asian countries with at least 25,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 800 related deaths as of April 26. China, Turkey and Iran are the other three.
India and China each has one fifth of world’s population ffs. The infection rate in each is tiny.
they show the graphs, from which one can infer whether the infection is increasing/decreasing
but the top-5 conclusion seems to be based on total cases, which is probably not the case if rate is considered
- The statistics indicate the contagion is diminished.
- No one knows why.
- Someone posits a plausible explanation of an effect seen in some (but not all) similar viruses.
- Explanation is dismissed without consideration, and the working theory us that the statistics are wrong.
There is evidence for the weather claim, but it's complicated by other factors.
Multiple studies [1] have observed a correlation between weather/UV and severity of outbreak.
Wuhan, Milan, Madrid, Qom, UK, Korea and Northern USA have all fit a comparable weather profile during their outbreaks.
The problem is that this virus seems to be more durable/resilient than other seasonal viruses (flu, common cold), and even in hot climates, many people still spend a lot of time congregated in air conditioned office/residential buildings, shopping centres, public transportation systems, etc.
So it's true that hot weather alone is not enough to end an outbreak.
But it can reduce the extent/severity, and the observed evidence seems to bear that out.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c8ed3692-6db3-11ea-9bca-bf503995c...
That alone cannot explain why deaths / infections ratio is low in India compared to the west. There are many hypothesis: - Higher testing in India - BCG vaccine immunity. None of these have been scientifically validated yet.
Where the relationship with "more outdoors" is kinda temperature dependent (not too cold nor too hot) and culturally/regionally dependent
As far as I know, no one has died in this street in a month. The ambulance hasn't entered the street either. So unless there's a great conspiracy which most of us in the street are unaware, there really doesn't seem to be that many deaths. In fact the death rate is lower than normal, when people normally die, the first ritual is the blowing of a very loud horn in front of their house for an entire day. Haven't heard that in weeks. I live in the middle of the fifth biggest city in the country as well. It's likely many people in the street already have this but it's very unlikely that many or any have died from covid.
For reference, official disease tally for my city is now 570 cases.
What? Why are doctors being beaten up? I don't understand.
Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/assam-mla-held-for...
I'm not arguing that it's justified, by the way. Or that it's a majority opinion. Just that it exists.
Is that your view?
> The Taliban began assassinating polio workers the year after the CIA used a vaccination campaign for hepatitis B, not polio, to identify Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150303-polio...
> There has been opposition to such immunisation drives from some powerful clerics while a fake CIA vaccination campaign, which helped to locate Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, is thought to have had a detrimental effect as well.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18868267
> Further, there's a great amount of scrutiny into whether anyone's sick (see the reports of doctors getting beaten up even by the cops).
Perhaps they could share a link about that.
0) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23005076
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And to be clear, I'm not arguing that he was murdered. I was just pointing out that some Muslims consider that he was murdered. I mean, the doctor who led the CIA to him is still in jail, and likely will be for the rest of his life. And the lawyer who defended him was murdered by the Taliban.
Unfortunately, the law of large numbers in India means that a "very few" can mean tens of thousands of people.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-52151141
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-13/doctors-c...
One problem is that although only a very few will see it this way, other people would be cautious about being caught up in it. This could affect the way they behave because if they think that somebody died in their house from this disease then they won't want to advertise that at all (eg by blowing horns) in case they were subsequently targeted. The fear is likely worse than the reality but behavior like this is driven more by fear.
However I can understand that ramraj07 says it seems unlikely on their street as it would surely be difficult in a close community to hide a van coming to take Auntie-ji away.
Add in the fact that many hospitals in North America are short on PPE, and some are even preventing nurses and care personnelle from wearing PPE (or to bring their own, etc) - and you can see how much of an issue this can be.
Of course, beating up the doctors is a bad idea, but the roots of the idea that health workers are potential spreaders isn't all that far fetched.
The anti-vax crowd in India tends to be on the violent side of things.
What I was implying is that perhaps things did go okay in terms of slowing the spread in India: of course, there's probably more spread than is being reported, but that seems par for course everywhere.
I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks.
The fifth biggest city in India population-wise is Ahmedabad but its case count is 2378.
The fifth biggest city in India area-wise is Hyderabad whose case count is 542.
Therefore I assumed OP meant Hyderabad. Both counts are from https://www.covid19india.org/
Sorry, what? The lockdown isn't about the rich or the poor. It is mostly about containing a deadly disease we don't fully understand yet. It is for the medics but also mostly to keep the social fabric intact. No one wants this to descent into chaos and madness without controls in-place. A deliberated and measured response is warranted despite an unprecedented loss of livelihood and absence of any real infrastructure to handle the fallout, especially to support the 500m people who live on daily-wages. Unless an effective prophylactic or a therapeutic treatment is discovered, lifting the lockdown can be disastrous for a country as dense as India and for incubation periods as long as they are for a rabidly contagious SARS-CoV-2.
Hopefully, the current situation improves in a month (most cities and states could possibly reopen in the coming weeks), but I wish the conversation around UBI (food subsidies including) and universal healthcare picks up steam rather than the pathetic pettiness around religious faultlines that seems to be in focus, all the time, aided by the ruling party's inclination to make a mockery out of democracy and India's minorities. I digress.
> Sorry, what? The lockdown isn't about rich or poor.
I think you misunderstood the parent comment. They are worried that the poor will be more negatively effected by the lockdown than by the coronavirus, in contrast to the rich. This has been observed in other countries, where the poor have had no way to sustain themselves without work, whereas the rich can just hide inside and wait it out without a problem.
GP said and I quote, "at the expense of the rich", which, to me, implies that somehow the rich are conspiring to persist with the lockdown. The families reliant on dialy-wages have always had massive problems in terms of education, healthcare, food, and shelter, and it isn't something the pandemic has birthed though it has aggravated it. There exists central and state government schemes to address these issues, but I wish there was a more systemic, consorted, and uniform approach to it with UBI and universal healthcare, instead.
The pandemic and quarantine haven't just aggravated an untenable situation, they're pushing it to the limits. The poor can't afford to not work, the rich can afford to remain in lock down. It's happening everywhere, not just in India.
There are those of us who can afford to be out of work for a long time, and there are those of us who can continue to work while maintaining quarantine, however there is a significant portion of the population that has run out of reserves and must work to live. These are people driving trucks, delivering packages, stocking shelves, generally putting themselves at risk while enabling the wealthy to remain quarantined.
I'm sorry it comes off like that. My intention was to point out that this situation isn't of advantage to anyone regardless of their social or economic standing. Sure, a lockdown is harsher on some people than the others, but life, in general, is harsher on some people more than on the others.
The pandemic is doing a great job at ringing the alarm bells. I hope it stirs the government and the policy makers into action and not use it instead for abhorrent religious and political mileage at the expense of steering away from building a support framework for all its citizens.
> ...using your command of the language to minimize the situation.
I'm not the one mentally replacing at the expense of with in contrast to.
> The pandemic and quarantine haven't just aggravated an untenable situation, they're pushing it to the limits.
You'd find that we are in agreement. I don't understand what part of my comment made you think I'm cold to their struggles.
As I said, it's the minimizing choice of language and your choice to ignore a grammatical error.
> I'm not the one mentally replacing at the expense of with in contrast to.
As I said before you're ignoring the grammatical errors in that sentence and paraphrasing to suit your argument.
> GP said and I quote, "at the expense of the rich",
That isn't what was said. The full quote:
> I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks.
Which is grammatically incorrect and doesn't make sense. However given the context and the structure of the sentence it's hard to draw the conclusion that you did. Rather, it's more likely the op mean to say something like:
> I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse than richer folks.
But some how you've interpreted it to mean that the richer are willing to accept some self harm if it means harming poor communities?
Fwiw, I didn't somehow interpret it purposefully in any sinsiter way or choose to ignore an error to start an argument. For some reason, that's just how I read it.
No worries, a lot of that was probably how it sounded in my head.
Isn't the whole point of the article that this isn't the case?
The author rather paints a skeptical view of the numbers coming out of India.
In such situations that is always the case. If there is a lockdown, poor will suffer financially. If no lockdown, poor will be exposed to the infection more than others since they have to be out working.
Today’s fashion is drama and any not hysteric action must end in doom and gloom.
this article is a bunch of baloney to undermine India's amazing progress to contain the chinese virus.
But India has a federal structure, different states may have different policies. It is pointless to make one statement about the whole country, especially when the numbers are coming from states, not the center.
Could people be hiding deaths due to the stigma around COVID? Quietly taking their loved ones' bodies out of the neighborhood for funerals?
Take today's data:
Delhi - 3,314 cases. (likely to go up as data is updated for tonight). Total population of Delhi is 19 Million.
Rajasthan - 2,438 cases. Total population: 68.9 Million
Haryana - 311 cases. Total population: 25.4 Million
Haryana has less than 10% of Delhi's covid case numbers while being a much larger state and while sharing a big border with both Delhi and Rajasthan where the covid cases are much higher. Also, huge numbers of people travel between Haryana and Delhi on a daily basis. Haryana's numbers make no sense.
Uttar Pradesh - 2,134 cases. Total population: 204 Million
About 30% less than Delhi while being much, much larger than Delhi and sharing a huge border with Delhi with vast numbers of people travelling to and from Delhi! Uttar Pradesh numbers too seem heavily under reported.
Bihar - 403 cases. Total population: 99 Million
Bihar has much, much lower covid cases than even Uttar Pradesh when Uttar Pradesh's numbers were themselves already suspiciously low. Bihar shares a huge border with Uttar Pradesh and there is simply no way Bihar with a much poorer healthcare infrastructure can have such low covid numbers.
Both UP and Bihar has huge numbers of migrants working in Delhi, Mumbai etc which makes these numbers even more dubious.
So on the face of it, there are big issues with these numbers being put out by some of the biggest states in India. If these numbers were more accurate, the overall figures for covid cases from India will be much higher.
India shares a massive border with China and is right next to China while having almost the same number of covid cases as Peru - which is halfway across the world from China and which is relatively shielded from the rest of the world in comparison to India - in terms of number of travellers coming in etc.
I literally know of no one who is sick, much less with covid19, here in India in my friend circle, in my family circle and across the 1000+ employee company I work in. Either there's asymptomatic sick in my circle or no one has it.
Granted I am anxious, and hope things don't get worse, but international media has been pathetic on reporting this. I like the work that local The Print is doing. Very informative reporting from them - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuyRsHZILrU7ZDIAbGASHdA
Here's a good example and relevant to this discussion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWuRA_2by-Q
For eg, the last video compares deaths vs testing in a poor country like Bolivia — situated many miles away from global hotspots to that of Belgium's — one of Europe's headquarters. It seems to suggest that increase in testing and quick isolation is somewhat of a "subjective" factor and doesn't help India.
This, completely disregarding factors like geography, demographics, Bolivia's first case landing a month after Belgium's, and Belgium being one of the few countries in Europe to actually count non-hospital deaths and more.
There's some confirmation bias here.
There is no indication that other common coronavirus infections such as those that cause 10-30% of common cold cases world wide provide any immunity to the current virus.
Also given the sheer size of India it’s unlikely that there would be a pathogen that provides immunity on this scale that would not have been identified previously since it would end up causing complications and deaths in some infections even if at much lower rates than previous epidemics.
If it also managed to spread across India It would’ve also spread worldwide.
Lastly like someone else mentioned migrants native to the region where hit pretty hard everywhere else.
I am back in India for a decade, never had such an experience again.
As you say, genetics is definitely not the reason for immunity or lower death rates. But I wonder whether human immunity is much lower coming out of the winter. India does not have severe subzero celsius winter except in the hills.
India has quite high influenza mortality rates https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6815659/
I would want to include in the discussion (and this is just my opinion and wild speculation by my part, not more, not less) the spring wildfires around Chernobyl area also in 2020. I wonder if ashes in the atmosphere are being also a hidden source of respiratory problems for Europe than nobody is taking in mind. Could explain the strange pattern of people that has recovered from the disease but somehow falls ill again and starts coughing again and again in waves, malaria style.
I remember similar massive coughs in all Europe in 2015 (if I'm not wrong) exactly at the same time that Russian and Ukrainian armies were burning forests in the North of Ukranie. I can be wrong, but there is not much to lose by researching that except time, and we have a lot currently. If we seen that spikes in hospital admissions match the burning periods and the wind direction plus a reasonable delay to reach the areas we could do further research.
Looking at the Spanish flu - it looks that if one were to account for famine, malnutrition, unsanitary conditions and other facts, it seems nothing out of the ordinary.
My friend lives in a very populated area in Delhi called Tilak nagar and he told me in feb end iirc that the house opposite his has a huge plaque on it that says *Quarantine, this house has a covid patient" put on by police. This was the time when nobody knew how serious this thing was. So yeah it does seem they got some things right too this time.
I mean, the US is (a) a developed country with modern health-care, (b) there is no common 'old parents living in same home with some of the adult children' situation you have in Italy + Eastern Europe, (c) there are no norms of common physical contact like 'kissing on meeting' (see France, Italy, northern Romania etc.), (d) the population is generally very dispersed (compare US density with areas of Western Europe or China) and (e) there is prevalent use of personal cars instead of public transport (as opposed to Western Europe and China, again), which should further diminish transmission.
US stats look worrying for everyone on Earth, it almost looks like a wild difference in viral strains or some other important but unknown factor.
The USA has a large population and I assume this is why you think the numbers are huge. Deaths per thousand are around a half of the UK and less than a third of Italy and Spain.
In not very worried by US stats they seem fairly similar to elsewhere in the world. What I'm worried about is that it seems like American politicians, media, people think they are much further along infection than they are.
Edit - typo
Source: am American
Hypertension and diabetes were listed as have a lot of impact of the mortality rates, and the general extremely bad health of the american population, coupled with the lack of a quality public health system made it the perfect target. That, plus more political issues, such as not being able to enforce curfew easily, a general mistrust in representatives, and a president that remained convinced it wasn't such a big deal for a very long time.
All in all, i think the number remain quite low compared to the worst case scenario.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/opinion/coronavirus-trump...
That's only true if you don't know what "per capita" means.
So far the US has 172 death per 1M population. That's better than other countries with supposedly better healthcare including:
- Belgium
- France
- Spain
- Italy
- UK
- Netherlands
- Sweden
- Ireland
- Switzerland
And many more.
> US stats look worrying for everyone on Earth
I'm more worried about people's inability to understand the difference between stats and absolute numbers specially on this site where we're supposed to know better.
This puts reasonable estimates of "how bad can it get?" at north of 5000 deaths per million, if we don't properly contain it. This, really, is the new information we're getting out of US numbers.
There are other place also doing poorly, some as badly as NYC, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse, but right now, until someone screws up worse, NYC is currently in the running for "worst COVID-19 death rate in a major city".
In addition to early travel exposure, common travelling, social factors-vs-car culture, obesity and diabetes, etc.
Within Europe, the BCG hypothesis seems a differentiating factor, though further studies are necessary. The reason for the effect of the vaccine are not currently known.
> some other important but unknown factor
The important factor is probably just very poor crisis management. US death rates aren't _that_ high, anyway; on paper they're low to medium vs Europe, though given that the rate of testing is lower than almost anywhere in Western Europe that's probably understated.
Two of double pneumonia, both with travel history, but their tests came up negative. They were both healthy until very recently. One had arrived from the US, where the chances of community-acquiring-pneumonia are low as I gather.
One of cardiac arrest, but AFAIK she wasn't tested because she had no travel history.
Also, they had all the other symptoms as well including fever and shortness of breath. One arrived in India with respiratory distress. The other fell ill a week after visiting a Covid hotspot -- Mumbai -- which he managed to visit despite a travel ban because he was a hotshot politician.
Sorry, I should have qualified that fully. I meant clinical sensitivity for RT-PCR for SARS-CoV-2 for samples drawn from throat swabs, specifically. I know that my local hospital is only taking throat swabs, not nasal swabs; and all the press photos I've seen for testing in India is of throat swabs.
That said, while lower death rates (India's seem to be about half of the world's death rate) are to be celebrated, there are confounding factors.
1) The reported death count are mostly hospital deaths only. Home deaths aren't counted.
2) As the article notes, mis-diagnosing is a problem especially outside hospitals.
But if there's something that genuinely is reducing the death rate, then that's obviously a huge opportunity to study and learn from.
[1] https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-s-lower-death-rate...
But during lockdown, reporting is to be done immediately.
There is not much misinformation in the media.
Basically, everyone has taken it seriously and is vigilant.
I also hear that those who took TB vaccine are more immune, and that is practically most of the younger and middle aged people in the country.
It appears that infection rates in India are low at the moment. It's not entirely clear why, but it could be a combination of hot weather, their nationally imposed lockdown, and lack of testing.
So you're saying there's no 5G?
Jokes aside, I would love a breakdown of all different hypotheses here and to revisit them in one year. (Eg therapies, heat/humidity effects, lockdown severity, lockdown timing, genetic factors, strain variations, etc)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC