7 ms·

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

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.

agumonkey 6y ago
It's not really about judging or comparing unfairly, it's more about india's population density in the case of a contagious disease.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rrmm 6y ago
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).
- dao- 6y ago
  "U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19" https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/covid-19-death-toll-undercounted/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
  - rrmm 6y ago
    exactly.
carlsborg 6y ago
India started lockdown when confirmed Covid deaths was at about 200 or 300 total. Its now at ~900 and doubling every ~10 days.
- pgo 6y ago
  You got the facts completely wrong, India started the lockdown when total deaths were just 10 ! Source: https://www.covid19india.org/ https://www.covid19india.org/
  - carlsborg 6y ago
    Right. My bad. I was looking at the lockdown extension date sorry.
pmachinery 6y ago
The TL;DR is in the final sentence: "we don't know". So many keystrokes and clicked bait on something nobody has any concrete insight into.
notahacker 6y ago
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.
- i_have_to_speak 6y ago
  When New York went in to lockdown, it had ~7000 cases (20th March) [1] 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-workforce-stay-home/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/20/politics/new-york-workfor... [2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Comparing cases is pretty meaningless if you don't also compare test rates.
    - pgo 6y ago
      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.
    - chosenbreed37 6y ago
      > 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.
thaway757383884 6y ago
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?
- unicornfinder 6y ago
  To be fair with the disinfectant that's been the case with India for years - I went in 2016 and they were doing it then as well.
  - callmeal 6y ago
    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.
  - eric_b 6y ago
    Yep, since 2014 at least. I always assumed it was some kind of insecticide/pesticide? Is it just a disinfectant?
    - _-___________-_ 6y ago
      It's an insecticide. It's common on routes to/from a number of countries.
JPKab 6y ago
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.
- rovolo 6y ago
  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". NYC: 1.07‰ New Orleans: 0.65‰ Detroit: 0.60‰ Boston: 0.44‰ Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/coronavirus-metro-area-tracker.html#metro-maps https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/corona...
  - legolas2412 6y ago
    I think you're off by a factor of 10 in your numbers
    - rovolo 6y ago
      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: NYC: 0.107% New Orleans: 0.065% Detroit: 0.060% Boston: 0.044% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mille
      - legolas2412 6y ago
        Ahh, today i learned
misja111 6y ago
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.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  China’s first response to doctors reporting the virus was to send police to them and shut them up. I’ll gladly believe I live in a better country.
  - mikem170 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago
vbezhenar 6y ago
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.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > 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.
  - sbmthakur 6y ago
    South Korean government did have strong laws on their side, some of which can be considered as draconian by American standards[1]. 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-authorities-used-law-fight-coronavirus https://www.lawfareblog.com/lessons-america-how-south-korean...
Bhilai 6y ago
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.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  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.

agumonkey 6y ago

It's not really about judging or comparing unfairly, it's more about india's population density in the case of a contagious disease.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

rrmm 6y ago

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).

dao- 6y ago
"U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19" https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/covid-19-death-toll-undercounted/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
- rrmm 6y ago
  exactly.

carlsborg 6y ago

India started lockdown when confirmed Covid deaths was at about 200 or 300 total. Its now at ~900 and doubling every ~10 days.

pgo 6y ago
You got the facts completely wrong, India started the lockdown when total deaths were just 10 ! Source: https://www.covid19india.org/ https://www.covid19india.org/
- carlsborg 6y ago
  Right. My bad. I was looking at the lockdown extension date sorry.

pmachinery 6y ago

The TL;DR is in the final sentence: "we don't know". So many keystrokes and clicked bait on something nobody has any concrete insight into.

notahacker 6y ago

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.

i_have_to_speak 6y ago
When New York went in to lockdown, it had ~7000 cases (20th March) [1] 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-workforce-stay-home/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/20/politics/new-york-workfor... [2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
- adrianN 6y ago
  Comparing cases is pretty meaningless if you don't also compare test rates.
  - pgo 6y ago
    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.
  - chosenbreed37 6y ago
    > 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.

thaway757383884 6y ago

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?

unicornfinder 6y ago
To be fair with the disinfectant that's been the case with India for years - I went in 2016 and they were doing it then as well.
- callmeal 6y ago
  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.
- eric_b 6y ago
  Yep, since 2014 at least. I always assumed it was some kind of insecticide/pesticide? Is it just a disinfectant?
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    It's an insecticide. It's common on routes to/from a number of countries.

JPKab 6y ago

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.

rovolo 6y ago
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". NYC: 1.07‰ New Orleans: 0.65‰ Detroit: 0.60‰ Boston: 0.44‰ Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/coronavirus-metro-area-tracker.html#metro-maps https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/corona...
- legolas2412 6y ago
  I think you're off by a factor of 10 in your numbers
  - rovolo 6y ago
    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: NYC: 0.107% New Orleans: 0.065% Detroit: 0.060% Boston: 0.044% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mille
    - legolas2412 6y ago
      Ahh, today i learned

misja111 6y ago

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.

gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
China’s first response to doctors reporting the virus was to send police to them and shut them up. I’ll gladly believe I live in a better country.
- mikem170 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago

vbezhenar 6y ago

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.

ignoramous 6y ago
> 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.
- sbmthakur 6y ago
  South Korean government did have strong laws on their side, some of which can be considered as draconian by American standards[1]. 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-authorities-used-law-fight-coronavirus https://www.lawfareblog.com/lessons-america-how-south-korean...

Bhilai 6y ago

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.

ignoramous 6y ago
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.