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How India went from a ray of hope to world record for most Covid cases in a day

throwawaysea 5y ago
This article notes that opposition political parties are trying to leverage the new wave of cases to attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but that just seems like an opportunist political tactic. Reading this article and others, this situation sounds like bad luck and tough circumstances more than anything else. Some of the approaches being taken there seem far more restrictive than anything I've seen in the US: > For example, apartment buildings where people test positive for the coronavirus have been sealed off, with no one allowed to enter or exit. Police patrol their perimeter. In India's two biggest cities, Mumbai and Delhi, local lockdowns are already in place. Only essential travel is allowed, with a permit. Everyone except for front-line workers have been told to work from home. Residents aren't allowed to go for a stroll or jog, or they'll be fined. It seems that Modi previously had announced a charitable policy of exporting half of India's vaccine doses to other countries that need it. One article (https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/indias-vaccine-complacency-costs-at-home-globally-7273501/ https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/indias-vaccine-com...) notes that over 60 million doses have been exported, and 52 million were administered to Indians. Another article (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/jugglebandhi/vexing-diplomacy-by-exporting-anti-virus-vaccines-to-90-countries-india-wins-bouquets-abroad-and-brickbats-at-home-f0-9f-98-8a/ https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/jugglebandhi/vexin...) notes that India even donated vaccines at no charge to some countries. I'm sure Modi is facing immense pressure to focus on Indians first, and some articles note that they've temporarily paused exports, but their export approach hardly seems like it deserves blame as much as applause. India is the world's largest vaccine producer, and while they pursue a charitable strategy, they're themselves facing export constraints from countries like the US. India's Serum Institute (world's largest vaccine manufacturer) has asked Joe Biden to relax export constraints for vaccine components (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-global-trade-india-coronavirus-pandemic-coronavirus-vaccine-50f18d8be1711d11744db710cfbb4c92 https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-global-trade-india-coro...). While many are using this moment to find a way to critique India's handling of the virus, it makes me feel bad as an American to see others attempt to be generous leaders for the world while we do the opposite. I don't think anyone is "evil" for putting their nation first - but putting COVID to rest requires we eradicate it worldwide.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  All countries that did well during the pandemic did a few steps: - immediately recognize the risk and call on domestic producers to increase mask production - freely, easily and regularly distribute masks to everyone, either for free or subsidize - rigorous regulation (not necessarily lockdown) of mask usage in places with either centralized(china) or decentralized(taiwan) contract tracing in every building. - a leadership that publicized and communicated the risks regularly - a leadership that led by example by wearing masks themselves - and a population that had some sort of sense of unity(common enemy) ALL countries that downplayed the pandemic ended up with second or third waves. I don't understand why you think it's bad luck.
  - euthuxnetux 5y ago
    I hate to be that guy, but these are all measurable claims and it would benefit the discussion here if you provided references.
    - natenthe 5y ago
      100% agreed. However, these anecdotal tales have no science and research behind them so references cannot be produced.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    I think "did well" is a spectrum. Some countries chose to enact very authoritarian lockdowns, and achieved success that way. Others balanced between freedoms and restrictions. Still others have to work within the bounds of their political system - what their laws permit and don't permit. From some quick web searches, it seems to me that India did many of the things you mentioned. I'm not sure if they did all of them, or to what extent they did each one - understanding that precisely is probably not possible without being involved in those particular actions. But it doesn't seem to me like they did nothing. > ALL countries that downplayed the pandemic ended up with second or third waves. Do you think India downplayed the pandemic? I don't get the sense given that they did building by building lockdowns and have police patrols ushering people back into their homes. We should keep in mind that each country is different - they have different population sizes, city densities, wealth levels, infrastructure quality, Internet access, cultural priorities, and so on. China is not India - it has an authoritarian governmental system. Taiwan is not India - it's small and rich and is an island. I'm not sure these comparisons are fair.
jeffbee 5y ago
TL;DR India has 1400 million inhabitants. They set the world record for everything regularly. Their per capita case rate is still half that of France.
- a9entroy 5y ago
  Anyone who is living in India knows that cases are severely underreported in India. Government is publishing statistics saying city a has x covid deaths in a day. But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags. You don't even have to believe me. Just look up covid deaths for your city and then go to the city's largest crematorium and count the number of bodies in covid body bags. (I know you just posted a tl;dr of the article and this is not necessarily your opinion.)
  - takoid 5y ago
    > Anyone who is living in India knows that cases are severely underreported in India. Government is publishing statistics saying city a has x covid deaths in a day. But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags. What would be the incentive for India's government to do this?
    - sorokod 5y ago
      Government on all levels wanting to appear more competent then they actually are?
      - takoid 5y ago
        That was my first thought as well but wouldn't that same logic apply to other countries as well? If not, why is this intentional suppression of COVID cases happening in India and not other countries like the United States and United Kingdom? At what point does the comparison of COVID cases between countries become meaningless as a result of countries manipulating the data they report?
        fakedang 5y ago
kensai 5y ago
They are into pre-election period. What else can possibly go wrong... :(
saiya-jin 5y ago
Did largest gathering of humans in the world - Kumbh Mela, which I think is still happening, played a big part in this spike? I mean folks come from all around India into 1 super-duper-massive gig of high density, they largely ignore any safety measures including masks (at least from photos I saw), and then happily go back home. Sounds like the best way possible to spread virus literally across whole subcontinent. Even without any new indian variant spreading, this must have left some significant effect on the numbers.
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  context: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56770460 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56770460
misiti3780 5y ago
Horribly sad. Given the case rate, I would expect the daily death rates to be a bit higher. A few months ago the US had a few days > 4K: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/
- masklinn 5y ago
  We know that deaths lag, on the linear graph active cases are skyrocketing but deaths are just starting to ramp back up. And reports are coming in of lack supply scarcity. > A few months ago the US had a few days > 4K: Note that this was with 9 million active cases (official). According to official numbers, india is at 2.5, yet already reaching 2200 daily deaths. And if you look at the correlation between daily deaths and active cases, the daily death maximums occur around the inflexion point in case growth (either peaking for the 1st and 3rd surges, or plateauing of the 2nd). The same occurred in India with their first wave (active cases peaked mid-september, so did deaths). Right now it's shooting straight up, they've already smashed through the US' maximum daily new cases, and the US reached theirs as the DNC's increase was slowing down.
  - AndrewBissell 5y ago
    > And reports are coming in of lack supply scarcity. We are now well over a year into this pandemic. The original justification for the lockdowns in the US was "15 days to slow the spread," i.e. that we would self quarantine to buy time to add ICU capacity, secure PPE and supplies for hospitals, etc. Instead ICU capacity was kept flat and economy-wide hospital staff were reduced and we were told "nope, keep doing this until we have a vaccine." Is there a single country in the world that has actually beefed up ICU capacity and secured basic supplies like oxygen for itself?
- jetru 5y ago
  A lot of deaths could be going un-reported. There could be multiple factors here: * India doesn't count everyone who died with COVID as having died of COVID. * There is something fishy going on with the number of cremations with "COVID protocol" compared to the number of reported COVID deaths on a day in multiple states * Just not enough infrastructure to handle this kind of situation
mkrazzledazzle 5y ago
Again, this is another instance of the descending world's needless doom and gloom portrayal of nations of the ascending world. India's human scale is enormous, while the case rates have been increasing at an alarming rate, India has the pharmaceutical infrastructure to deploy vaccines in billions scale. The Serum institute of india has been the world's largest producer of vaccines and has selflessly helped out countries like brazil during their worst times. All this when some nations have imposed strict restrictions on the export of raw materials for producing vaccines, their own infra crumbling, selfishly procuring 10x the number of vaccines than necessary etc., Ok. We get it, Sure.
- KorematsuFred 5y ago
  Yes. This is an important point to note. USA is sitting on 30M pile of AstraZeneca vaccine which is not even approved in USA. They could have simply sold it to India. USA is also stockpiling, glass, containers and other raw material which USA is not technically short of. On top of this German Chancellor yesterday said that "we allowed India to become a pharma powerhouse but now we have to rethink". This is because India is producing cheaper vaccine.
  - ketamine__ 5y ago
    > On top of this German Chancellor yesterday said that "we allowed India to become a pharma powerhouse but now we have to rethink". This is because India is producing cheaper vaccine. They are worried the surge in India will delay shipments to the EU. The EU wants cheaper vaccines! That's why they took so long to negotiate the contracts. They thought a vaccine wouldn't be produced in record time and because of that they felt they had a lot of time to negotiate. > “We now have a situation with India where, in connection with the emergency situation of the pandemic, we are worried whether the pharmaceutical products will still come to us.” [0] [0] https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/angela-merkel-laments-they-allowed-india-to-become-pharmacy-of-world/ https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/angela-merkel-laments-they-a...
- tim333 5y ago
  >India has the pharmaceutical infrastructure to deploy vaccines in billions scale Well yeah eventually but that's mostly not going to be in time for the present wave.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
To me this shows how hard to predict the whole thing is. Germany did well for a long time and suddenly they got hit like everybody else. Same for India. Seems the only countries that keep doing well are the ones with super strict lockdowns and quarantine. Everybody else gets hit sooner or later.
- makomk 5y ago
  Yeah, and the Czech Republic, which used to be the big European success story which proved everyone else should be able to do better, ended up with the most Covid-19 deaths per capita in Europe (maybe in the world, can't remember). So many confident predictions failed and then were quietly forgotten.
  - AndrewBissell 5y ago
    Specifically, the Czechs were praised for their early and aggressive mask mandates and compliance rates, which were credited with keeping their infection rate lower than European neighbors.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      Unfortunately, once no Armageddon happened, the population got tired of the restrictions and the politicians followed. Then, the British variant arrived and here we are, world champions in deaths per thousand people.
      - AndrewBissell 5y ago
        It's almost like these interventions can't be maintained indefinitely and are therefore stopgaps at best. With the CDC's own study saying masks reduce transmission by all of 2%, I doubt it was lack of mask wearing that made the difference. There's still no Armageddon happening anywhere.
        NationalPark 5y ago
waihtis 5y ago
If there's still someone who touts the "but X people die of the flu/car crashes/whatever per year", let this be a lesson of non-linear scaling and why you need to take this property very seriously with contagious & lethal disease.
- Florin_Andrei 5y ago
  At this point I feel that category of people may not be able to absorb any rational lesson at all.
- HonestOp001 5y ago
  How do you make choices on things if you do not have a comparison. I have friends in India that are losing their jobs and are becoming hopeless for their future. What impact long term psychologically can we assign a cost to this? Are we okay with telling people: you lucky ones who can quarantine, hunker down. You lot who are the undesirables, fetch my water in the world amongst the other masses. There needs to be an operations research department that has the gimp from that John Travolta movie that comes out and says: “here is our cold hearted calculation. For Covid, everyone needs to get healthy, survival rates for under 30 BMI are pretty much perfect, over that, we will see 87% of fatalities amongst this group.” Instead, of getting this sort of information, we got: “everyone can get sick, equally!” We knew early on the mortality was higher for older folks, did this delineation happen, nope. Instead of isolating the elderly, Cuomo sent infected back into the old folks homes! Then lied / hid the data of deaths.
  - kingofpandora 5y ago
    Agree ... But "take seriously" can mean not going to a religious festival with a million other people.
  - waihtis 5y ago
    > How do you make choices on things if you do not have a comparison Point is that it is NOT good to compare COVID and non-scaling death factors. But I do agree it is a more difficult overall problem than this - think the main failure is the rigid-as-steel top-down governance models that takes ages to react to even major environmental changes and make borderline idiotic decisions when being too far removed from their effects.
eddywebs 5y ago
B1617 strain emerging from India is a cocktail of worst parts of the strains originated from UK, SA and Bra. The strain is known to be more contagious and deadlier.
- thunkshift1 5y ago
  Any links or sources?
  - eddywebs 5y ago
    Further details - https://science.thewire.in/health/sars-cov-2-variants-b117-b1617-india-second-wave-uncertain-future/ https://science.thewire.in/health/sars-cov-2-variants-b117-b...
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: India's massive COVID surge puzzles scientists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898889 - April 2021 (146 comments) India’s second wave - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886829 - April 2021 (438 comments)
RickJWagner 5y ago
Not directly about this story, but an interesting find: Use Google to search for "India Coronavirus" or something similar. Check the 'news' items. In my searches, the top results all have similar political leanings. Is this still politicized? I can't imagine why, if it is.
wtmt 5y ago
It’s been quite shocking to see the numbers climb here in India. A year ago, we had an ill planned and devastating lockdown across the country. Like the article briefly mentions, the economy tanked and worse, millions of migrant workers were left without jobs and without a way to get back to their homes (and be with their families if they were anyway going to be jobless and starve). Now the Prime Minister and the Home Minister have mostly left it to the states to deal with this. When numbers (to the extent that they could be relied on) started going down around August or September last year, a lot of complacency set in. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Home Minister Amit Shah (along with many others in the ruling parties) declared victory. Many politicians themselves have been irresponsible and got infected by participating in large gatherings (following the adage, “do as I say, not as I do”). The PM even boasted early this year in an international economic summit about how India had shown the way to the world in handling COVID-19 — what way, I have no idea. The beliefs that Indians were generally immune to SARS-CoV-2 and that a country with more than two thirds of the population being quite young didn’t have much to worry about were quite strong. There have been unsubstantiated beliefs in technology as something that can single handedly beat this. Last year, the central government and its bureaucracy decided that app based contact tracing would defeat this and released apps (announced as open source but with late and outdated releases of the source code)...this in a country where smartphone usage is minuscule and having GPS and background location tracking on 24x7 for it to collect and save data on servers without good privacy policies was necessary. That app became a gatekeeper to get into places that wanted to see your status (which was just a set of questions to answer) as green. Now that vaccines are available, the same push for using the flawed biometric resident number (called Aadhaar) to track and even decide whether to provide vaccines has been slowing things down a lot. Officially, Aadhaar is one of several identity documents accepted for vaccination. But practically, providing any other government identity document means having to argue with data entry operators (who have been instructed to insist on Aadhaar) or waiting to speak to senior officials to escalate matters. Recently, they have been making it mandatory to authenticate with some sort of biometrics when the Aadhaar number is given (one of the aims of this is to capture more/better photos and use for facial recognition). With a massive population of nearly 1.4 billion, I don’t understand how all these barriers are going to help (note that there is also an uninformed unique health ID being created for people on the back of the vaccination efforts). Vested interests and those who have only one technology solution for every problem seem to be running the show. Late last year, India got truly lucky with this pandemic. One can only hope that we get lucky once again, with how things have been handled by the governments.
known 5y ago
Modi is only protecting the interests of Ambani/Adani; For the poor/patients/students/farmers/volunteers it's sedition/media manipulation with the help of bigots in the Supreme Court;

This article notes that opposition political parties are trying to leverage the new wave of cases to attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but that just seems like an opportunist political tactic. Reading this article and others, this situation sounds like bad luck and tough circumstances more than anything else. Some of the approaches being taken there seem far more restrictive than anything I've seen in the US: > For example, apartment buildings where people test positive for the coronavirus have been sealed off, with no one allowed to enter or exit. Police patrol their perimeter. In India's two biggest cities, Mumbai and Delhi, local lockdowns are already in place. Only essential travel is allowed, with a permit. Everyone except for front-line workers have been told to work from home. Residents aren't allowed to go for a stroll or jog, or they'll be fined. It seems that Modi previously had announced a charitable policy of exporting half of India's vaccine doses to other countries that need it. One article (https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/indias-vaccine-complacency-costs-at-home-globally-7273501/ https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/indias-vaccine-com...) notes that over 60 million doses have been exported, and 52 million were administered to Indians. Another article (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/jugglebandhi/vexing-diplomacy-by-exporting-anti-virus-vaccines-to-90-countries-india-wins-bouquets-abroad-and-brickbats-at-home-f0-9f-98-8a/ https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/jugglebandhi/vexin...) notes that India even donated vaccines at no charge to some countries. I'm sure Modi is facing immense pressure to focus on Indians first, and some articles note that they've temporarily paused exports, but their export approach hardly seems like it deserves blame as much as applause. India is the world's largest vaccine producer, and while they pursue a charitable strategy, they're themselves facing export constraints from countries like the US. India's Serum Institute (world's largest vaccine manufacturer) has asked Joe Biden to relax export constraints for vaccine components (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-global-trade-india-coronavirus-pandemic-coronavirus-vaccine-50f18d8be1711d11744db710cfbb4c92 https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-global-trade-india-coro...). While many are using this moment to find a way to critique India's handling of the virus, it makes me feel bad as an American to see others attempt to be generous leaders for the world while we do the opposite. I don't think anyone is "evil" for putting their nation first - but putting COVID to rest requires we eradicate it worldwide.

rjzzleep 5y ago
All countries that did well during the pandemic did a few steps: - immediately recognize the risk and call on domestic producers to increase mask production - freely, easily and regularly distribute masks to everyone, either for free or subsidize - rigorous regulation (not necessarily lockdown) of mask usage in places with either centralized(china) or decentralized(taiwan) contract tracing in every building. - a leadership that publicized and communicated the risks regularly - a leadership that led by example by wearing masks themselves - and a population that had some sort of sense of unity(common enemy) ALL countries that downplayed the pandemic ended up with second or third waves. I don't understand why you think it's bad luck.
- euthuxnetux 5y ago
  I hate to be that guy, but these are all measurable claims and it would benefit the discussion here if you provided references.
  - natenthe 5y ago
    100% agreed. However, these anecdotal tales have no science and research behind them so references cannot be produced.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  I think "did well" is a spectrum. Some countries chose to enact very authoritarian lockdowns, and achieved success that way. Others balanced between freedoms and restrictions. Still others have to work within the bounds of their political system - what their laws permit and don't permit. From some quick web searches, it seems to me that India did many of the things you mentioned. I'm not sure if they did all of them, or to what extent they did each one - understanding that precisely is probably not possible without being involved in those particular actions. But it doesn't seem to me like they did nothing. > ALL countries that downplayed the pandemic ended up with second or third waves. Do you think India downplayed the pandemic? I don't get the sense given that they did building by building lockdowns and have police patrols ushering people back into their homes. We should keep in mind that each country is different - they have different population sizes, city densities, wealth levels, infrastructure quality, Internet access, cultural priorities, and so on. China is not India - it has an authoritarian governmental system. Taiwan is not India - it's small and rich and is an island. I'm not sure these comparisons are fair.

jeffbee 5y ago

TL;DR India has 1400 million inhabitants. They set the world record for everything regularly. Their per capita case rate is still half that of France.

a9entroy 5y ago
Anyone who is living in India knows that cases are severely underreported in India. Government is publishing statistics saying city a has x covid deaths in a day. But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags. You don't even have to believe me. Just look up covid deaths for your city and then go to the city's largest crematorium and count the number of bodies in covid body bags. (I know you just posted a tl;dr of the article and this is not necessarily your opinion.)
- takoid 5y ago
  > Anyone who is living in India knows that cases are severely underreported in India. Government is publishing statistics saying city a has x covid deaths in a day. But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags. What would be the incentive for India's government to do this?
  - sorokod 5y ago
    Government on all levels wanting to appear more competent then they actually are?
    - takoid 5y ago
      That was my first thought as well but wouldn't that same logic apply to other countries as well? If not, why is this intentional suppression of COVID cases happening in India and not other countries like the United States and United Kingdom? At what point does the comparison of COVID cases between countries become meaningless as a result of countries manipulating the data they report?
      - fakedang 5y ago

kensai 5y ago

They are into pre-election period. What else can possibly go wrong... :(

saiya-jin 5y ago

Did largest gathering of humans in the world - Kumbh Mela, which I think is still happening, played a big part in this spike? I mean folks come from all around India into 1 super-duper-massive gig of high density, they largely ignore any safety measures including masks (at least from photos I saw), and then happily go back home. Sounds like the best way possible to spread virus literally across whole subcontinent. Even without any new indian variant spreading, this must have left some significant effect on the numbers.

WillPostForFood 5y ago
context: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56770460 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56770460

misiti3780 5y ago

Horribly sad. Given the case rate, I would expect the daily death rates to be a bit higher. A few months ago the US had a few days > 4K: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/

masklinn 5y ago
We know that deaths lag, on the linear graph active cases are skyrocketing but deaths are just starting to ramp back up. And reports are coming in of lack supply scarcity. > A few months ago the US had a few days > 4K: Note that this was with 9 million active cases (official). According to official numbers, india is at 2.5, yet already reaching 2200 daily deaths. And if you look at the correlation between daily deaths and active cases, the daily death maximums occur around the inflexion point in case growth (either peaking for the 1st and 3rd surges, or plateauing of the 2nd). The same occurred in India with their first wave (active cases peaked mid-september, so did deaths). Right now it's shooting straight up, they've already smashed through the US' maximum daily new cases, and the US reached theirs as the DNC's increase was slowing down.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  > And reports are coming in of lack supply scarcity. We are now well over a year into this pandemic. The original justification for the lockdowns in the US was "15 days to slow the spread," i.e. that we would self quarantine to buy time to add ICU capacity, secure PPE and supplies for hospitals, etc. Instead ICU capacity was kept flat and economy-wide hospital staff were reduced and we were told "nope, keep doing this until we have a vaccine." Is there a single country in the world that has actually beefed up ICU capacity and secured basic supplies like oxygen for itself?
jetru 5y ago
A lot of deaths could be going un-reported. There could be multiple factors here: * India doesn't count everyone who died with COVID as having died of COVID. * There is something fishy going on with the number of cremations with "COVID protocol" compared to the number of reported COVID deaths on a day in multiple states * Just not enough infrastructure to handle this kind of situation

mkrazzledazzle 5y ago

Again, this is another instance of the descending world's needless doom and gloom portrayal of nations of the ascending world. India's human scale is enormous, while the case rates have been increasing at an alarming rate, India has the pharmaceutical infrastructure to deploy vaccines in billions scale. The Serum institute of india has been the world's largest producer of vaccines and has selflessly helped out countries like brazil during their worst times. All this when some nations have imposed strict restrictions on the export of raw materials for producing vaccines, their own infra crumbling, selfishly procuring 10x the number of vaccines than necessary etc., Ok. We get it, Sure.

KorematsuFred 5y ago
Yes. This is an important point to note. USA is sitting on 30M pile of AstraZeneca vaccine which is not even approved in USA. They could have simply sold it to India. USA is also stockpiling, glass, containers and other raw material which USA is not technically short of. On top of this German Chancellor yesterday said that "we allowed India to become a pharma powerhouse but now we have to rethink". This is because India is producing cheaper vaccine.
- ketamine__ 5y ago
  > On top of this German Chancellor yesterday said that "we allowed India to become a pharma powerhouse but now we have to rethink". This is because India is producing cheaper vaccine. They are worried the surge in India will delay shipments to the EU. The EU wants cheaper vaccines! That's why they took so long to negotiate the contracts. They thought a vaccine wouldn't be produced in record time and because of that they felt they had a lot of time to negotiate. > “We now have a situation with India where, in connection with the emergency situation of the pandemic, we are worried whether the pharmaceutical products will still come to us.” [0] [0] https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/angela-merkel-laments-they-allowed-india-to-become-pharmacy-of-world/ https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/angela-merkel-laments-they-a...
tim333 5y ago
>India has the pharmaceutical infrastructure to deploy vaccines in billions scale Well yeah eventually but that's mostly not going to be in time for the present wave.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

To me this shows how hard to predict the whole thing is. Germany did well for a long time and suddenly they got hit like everybody else. Same for India. Seems the only countries that keep doing well are the ones with super strict lockdowns and quarantine. Everybody else gets hit sooner or later.

makomk 5y ago
Yeah, and the Czech Republic, which used to be the big European success story which proved everyone else should be able to do better, ended up with the most Covid-19 deaths per capita in Europe (maybe in the world, can't remember). So many confident predictions failed and then were quietly forgotten.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  Specifically, the Czechs were praised for their early and aggressive mask mandates and compliance rates, which were credited with keeping their infection rate lower than European neighbors.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Unfortunately, once no Armageddon happened, the population got tired of the restrictions and the politicians followed. Then, the British variant arrived and here we are, world champions in deaths per thousand people.
    - AndrewBissell 5y ago
      It's almost like these interventions can't be maintained indefinitely and are therefore stopgaps at best. With the CDC's own study saying masks reduce transmission by all of 2%, I doubt it was lack of mask wearing that made the difference. There's still no Armageddon happening anywhere.
      - NationalPark 5y ago

waihtis 5y ago

If there's still someone who touts the "but X people die of the flu/car crashes/whatever per year", let this be a lesson of non-linear scaling and why you need to take this property very seriously with contagious & lethal disease.

Florin_Andrei 5y ago
At this point I feel that category of people may not be able to absorb any rational lesson at all.
HonestOp001 5y ago
How do you make choices on things if you do not have a comparison. I have friends in India that are losing their jobs and are becoming hopeless for their future. What impact long term psychologically can we assign a cost to this? Are we okay with telling people: you lucky ones who can quarantine, hunker down. You lot who are the undesirables, fetch my water in the world amongst the other masses. There needs to be an operations research department that has the gimp from that John Travolta movie that comes out and says: “here is our cold hearted calculation. For Covid, everyone needs to get healthy, survival rates for under 30 BMI are pretty much perfect, over that, we will see 87% of fatalities amongst this group.” Instead, of getting this sort of information, we got: “everyone can get sick, equally!” We knew early on the mortality was higher for older folks, did this delineation happen, nope. Instead of isolating the elderly, Cuomo sent infected back into the old folks homes! Then lied / hid the data of deaths.
- kingofpandora 5y ago
  Agree ... But "take seriously" can mean not going to a religious festival with a million other people.
- waihtis 5y ago
  > How do you make choices on things if you do not have a comparison Point is that it is NOT good to compare COVID and non-scaling death factors. But I do agree it is a more difficult overall problem than this - think the main failure is the rigid-as-steel top-down governance models that takes ages to react to even major environmental changes and make borderline idiotic decisions when being too far removed from their effects.

eddywebs 5y ago

B1617 strain emerging from India is a cocktail of worst parts of the strains originated from UK, SA and Bra. The strain is known to be more contagious and deadlier.

thunkshift1 5y ago
Any links or sources?
- eddywebs 5y ago
  Further details - https://science.thewire.in/health/sars-cov-2-variants-b117-b1617-india-second-wave-uncertain-future/ https://science.thewire.in/health/sars-cov-2-variants-b117-b...

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: India's massive COVID surge puzzles scientists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898889 - April 2021 (146 comments) India’s second wave - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886829 - April 2021 (438 comments)

RickJWagner 5y ago

Not directly about this story, but an interesting find: Use Google to search for "India Coronavirus" or something similar. Check the 'news' items. In my searches, the top results all have similar political leanings. Is this still politicized? I can't imagine why, if it is.

wtmt 5y ago

It’s been quite shocking to see the numbers climb here in India. A year ago, we had an ill planned and devastating lockdown across the country. Like the article briefly mentions, the economy tanked and worse, millions of migrant workers were left without jobs and without a way to get back to their homes (and be with their families if they were anyway going to be jobless and starve). Now the Prime Minister and the Home Minister have mostly left it to the states to deal with this. When numbers (to the extent that they could be relied on) started going down around August or September last year, a lot of complacency set in. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Home Minister Amit Shah (along with many others in the ruling parties) declared victory. Many politicians themselves have been irresponsible and got infected by participating in large gatherings (following the adage, “do as I say, not as I do”). The PM even boasted early this year in an international economic summit about how India had shown the way to the world in handling COVID-19 — what way, I have no idea. The beliefs that Indians were generally immune to SARS-CoV-2 and that a country with more than two thirds of the population being quite young didn’t have much to worry about were quite strong. There have been unsubstantiated beliefs in technology as something that can single handedly beat this. Last year, the central government and its bureaucracy decided that app based contact tracing would defeat this and released apps (announced as open source but with late and outdated releases of the source code)...this in a country where smartphone usage is minuscule and having GPS and background location tracking on 24x7 for it to collect and save data on servers without good privacy policies was necessary. That app became a gatekeeper to get into places that wanted to see your status (which was just a set of questions to answer) as green. Now that vaccines are available, the same push for using the flawed biometric resident number (called Aadhaar) to track and even decide whether to provide vaccines has been slowing things down a lot. Officially, Aadhaar is one of several identity documents accepted for vaccination. But practically, providing any other government identity document means having to argue with data entry operators (who have been instructed to insist on Aadhaar) or waiting to speak to senior officials to escalate matters. Recently, they have been making it mandatory to authenticate with some sort of biometrics when the Aadhaar number is given (one of the aims of this is to capture more/better photos and use for facial recognition). With a massive population of nearly 1.4 billion, I don’t understand how all these barriers are going to help (note that there is also an uninformed unique health ID being created for people on the back of the vaccination efforts). Vested interests and those who have only one technology solution for every problem seem to be running the show. Late last year, India got truly lucky with this pandemic. One can only hope that we get lucky once again, with how things have been handled by the governments.

known 5y ago

Modi is only protecting the interests of Ambani/Adani; For the poor/patients/students/farmers/volunteers it's sedition/media manipulation with the help of bigots in the Supreme Court;