7 ms·

Why is India having a Covid-19 surge?

54 points by dberhane 5y ago

pmoriarty 5y ago
"India Is What Happens When Rich People Do Nothing" https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/04/india-covid19-moral-failure/618702/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/04/in...
- doopy1 5y ago
  Good thing all the rich people saved us here in the US.
  - newacct583 5y ago
    Not for lack of trying, to be perfectly honest. The US mitigation response kept the virus just barely under the disaster threshold, despite major figures in the federal government actively opposing most of those measures at one time or another. But the vaccines worked, so those rich people got it done. mRNA was a gamble, but it paid off with first trials starting just weeks after the virus was sequenced and first doses entering general patients in nine months instead of the 18 we were originally expecting. But let's not imagine that the US response wasn't otherwise a disaster, especially when compared to places like Australia and Korea who barely needed to wait for the vaccine at all.
    - hpoe 5y ago
      So I see people always pointing out SK and NZ and Australia as great examples of handling the virus but it seems to me that naturally controlling travel through an island* would be much easier to do anyway, also an island is unlikely to end up as a major throughfare? Could this factor into the difference at all? *I know SK isn't technically an island but for all practical purposes it is.
      - AnotherGoodName 5y ago
        A border policy helps stop infection coming in and internal mask+stay at home policies help when the infection is already in the city. Seoul, Sydney and Melbourne all had big outbreaks. The policies they took were effective in bringing the outbreak within the cities under control. So yes border control helps but you shouldn't also discount policies such as the 'hard lockdowns' https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53289616 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53289616 where people cannot leave there homes at all for any reason if there's known cases in the immediate area.
      - cmurf 5y ago
        Ok and where is the evidence the spread is significantly due to land border crossings? You really think the U.S. was being infected by Mexicans and Canadians? Refugees? That India is being infected by some or all the countries surrounding them? You must necessarily think these are illegal crossings because legal ones require COVID testing. All it takes is a critical mass of your own population getting it, followed by wide scale gathering of millions of people with no meaningful mitigations. That's the obvious and simple cause.
        benjohnson 5y ago
        As I understand it, the current refugee crisis at the American southern border has a large Covid-19 component. This report says that at least one facility has a 10% infection rate. At the current time, in my opinion, The American border can't keep out any pandemic if our neighbors have it. And vise versa.
        newacct583 5y ago
        How does that square with both Mexico and Canada having significantly milder outbreaks on average? Objectively, aren't we giving it to them and not the reverse?
        benjohnson 5y ago
        Either way - an open border is rotten for pandemic containment.
maxerickson 5y ago
Some good news about the "double mutant", it doesn't appear to impact vaccine effectiveness (using antibody reactivity as a measure) more than either mutation alone. https://twitter.com/GuptaR_lab/status/1388422661018116097 https://twitter.com/GuptaR_lab/status/1388422661018116097
- baybal2 5y ago
  But it seem to be capable of infecting previously recovered people much more vigorously. People who got original covid strain may now be getting reinfected again.
  - DiNovi 5y ago
    What's sad is we have enough evidence to show people they need a vaccine to prevent re-infection, yet it doesnt seem to move the needle for many where vaccines are plentiful
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    Is this just anecdotal or ? Basically no theory about high prevalence of previous infection has survived the test of time, so I think to say something like 'infecting previously recovered people much more vigorously' takes some solid evidence.
    - mlyle 5y ago
      I was not concerned about all previous reinfection reports--- after all, anything will happen sporadically. But I believe recent immune-escape variants are a much higher risk here. Vaccines generate a much higher antibody titer and a much broader complement of antibody responses than natural infection, and still are noticeably less effective against emerging variants. Waning immunity also will contribute to this concern: reinfection gets more likely with time even without variants. I believe that even if one is reinfected, one is still partially protected against severe illness by the remaining antibody complements and other means, e.g. t-cell mediated immunity. Mind you, I don't think this is a huge absolute risk. I just think it's significant enough to be a significant confound for those of us trying to guess what Rt would be with a return to baseline behavior, and enough for people who've "had it" to be less protected than they might expect.
mulvya 5y ago
The wave isn't primarily due to loosening of restrictions or slack in behaviour. It's due to, for a lack of a better term, environmental factors. Look at the countries in the vicinity of India; they all show similar rise at around the same time. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/pakistan/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/pakistan/#... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/bangladesh/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/bangladesh... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sri-lanka/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sri-lanka/... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/maldives/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/maldives/#... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iran/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iran/#grap... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/kazakhstan/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/kazakhstan... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/azerbaijan/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/azerbaijan... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uzbekistan/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uzbekistan... ... COVID is seasonal: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.28.21252625v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.28.21252625v... Mumbai had the peak of its 'first wave' on October 7th. See mobility trends for vehicular and pedestrian traffic at https://covid19.apple.com/mobility https://covid19.apple.com/mobility. You'll see both monotonically increasing as the peak approaches and then recedes. If this were a simple morality tale of the level of social contact, this wouldn't be the case. See this paper for a more thorough look at the epidemiological mysteries of an infectious respiratory disease: https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-422X-5-29 https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-42...
- Angostura 5y ago
  Well, if you look at a comparison graph of the countries directly adjoining India, the differences are pretty stark. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=earliest..2021-04-29&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_cases_smoothed_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=BGD~IND~PAK~LKA https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
roenxi 5y ago
At some point people really have to stop trying to guess what is going on in real-time and adopt a more patient, evidence based approach. India is huge, the healthcare system is said to be collapsing and most of them don't speak English. We aren't going to get coherent reporting in the English press for a few months. On the other hand, if we're worried about variants then I hope there are some hard conversations happening about what the strategy here is. Part of what went wrong at the start of COVID around March 2020 was the reactive approach waiting for hard proof that the disease would slip through the borders before cancelling flights. This approach runs a risk that any action will be taken too late. To be honest, I'm confused by the amount of air travel that is still going on. If locking down large swathes of most countries is on the cards, why is there any air travel happening? Why was there a high profile diplomatic visit to India being planned? Are the benefits from all these plane trips really outweighing the costs? We may as well be trying to evolve COVID to sneak past quarantines. How is it acceptable to scuttle the economy in response to COVID, why are there still plane flights 12 months in to the pandemic? Someone fill me in on what I've missed; this seems to be not taking the situation seriously. Are these variants not going to be travelling between countries by plane and ship?
- ghaff 5y ago
  I'm constantly reminded that I clearly live in something of a bubble. I think I know a few people who took a plane to ride out the pandemic somewhere they saw as safer and one person who took an international trip to do some business. But that's about it. And a lot of people I know, including myself, practically live in planes normally. Yet, while air travel is down significantly, it's not that far down. Certainly not the 95% decrease it is in my circle.
  - 0xdde 5y ago
    What makes you say that? While it may be rebounding now, there was a long stretch where it was down 95%, if not more, as evident from, say, https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput. I don't think other countries fared better.
mdani 5y ago
I visited India in Dec 2020, so here's my personal take on this based on what I saw. The first lockdown in India was very severe and it basically made the second lockdown pretty unpopular in the business community, at least initially. The dithering contributed to even bigger second wave. The reasons behind the lull between the first and the second waves were not entirely clear, and some people assumed that the herd immunity is being reached. Combined with the desire to return to normalcy after a harsh lockdown, it falsely assured people that the worst was behind them. This created the perfect conditions for a bigger second wave. Finally, the state and every petty official was intoxicated by the powers they weilded during the first lockdown, and they forgot that with great power comes the great responsibility. They unnecessarily focused on tiny things such as fining people Rs. 500 at the traffic lights, while not really understanding the new information on how virus spreads, what are the best ways to tackle transmission and so on. People should have been given the liberty to be outdoors with proper face covering when there was good airflow. They shpuld have known that meeting indoors with poor airflow was the biggest threat. This wasn't communicated properly. Some government officials did take decisions proactively to save their own district. For example, see here https://youtu.be/Sa4vCG1oY6M https://youtu.be/Sa4vCG1oY6M But unfortunately, this was the exception rather than the norm.
- newsHere 5y ago
  The Michigan governor had a similar issue. The lockdown was well intended, but when she opened casinos, bars, and restaurants but closed gyms, it was clear that safety was second priority. In politics you don't get credit for trying to be good, you only get credit for succeeding.
- kshacker 5y ago
  While the first lockdown may not have been popular, the top 3 reasons for the second wave were 1) muddled message from the top with massive election rallies and no one wearing masks, 2) the religious kumbh congregation was allowed to proceed as normal while a similar (in comparison, a smaller muslim congregation was demonized last year to the extent of jailing some folks), and 3) total lack of preparation of vaccines, drugs, and even oxygen. You only need the queuing theory to explain how systems can break down when the demand changes just a tiny bit. The complete celebratory attitude with a mild (covid) winter made them forget all the planning that they did not even order their vaccines (at least the numbers they needed). Just in case this seems like a critique of the government, let me add both the people and the government were irresponsible, but a cautionary message from top would have helped and that did not happen in time.
drumhead 5y ago
A combination of triumphalism and Stupidity. The govt there thought that they'd seen off the worst of pandemic and that they'd achieved herd immunity, so they didnt bother preparing for a second wave. Then politicans decided to hold massive election rallies, allow the largest religious festival in the world to go ahead and open up stadiums for sporting events.
- k__ 5y ago
  How come their second wave comes so late?
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    What if it's early and we just don't know yet? Everyone acts as though "COVID is almost behind us" which is part of why we keep seeing these new waves. We are in such a rush to get back to normal at all costs, and keep doing it too early.
    - lambdaba 5y ago
      If people would spend more time outside in summer, destressing, getting vitamin D, improving their immunity etc. then we can expect the current cycle to end as respiratory infectious diseases tend to. The coercive measures by govs are pushing in the opposite direction.
      - hesarenu 5y ago
        But is there any evidence that spending time outside, vitamin d etc reduces covid. April and May are peak summer time in India. Most of the states are open not in lockdown mode, but cases are growing rapidly.
        lambdaba 5y ago
        Haven't people changed their behavior though? Avoiding going outside, having fewer diversity in social interactions but longer durations, and indoors. There is definitely evidence for vitamin D, it's odd this is still not yet widely acknowledged, I can't say I reviewed the research myself but credible people have and have been spreading the information. I've definitely heard of some governments having taken measures for prevention with vitamin D, but there are also some results if administered early enough after infection. Vitamin D is essential for immune system function, but the wider picture is more complex with high vitamin D levels also correlating with better nutrition (diets higher in cholesterol, which is essential for hormone synthesis - is generally lower in people having severe forms), better immune system function (infections deplete vitamin D), and even activity levels (spending more time outside).
webmobdev 5y ago
As an indian, this Pandemic is an eye opener to me on the devastating impact that flawed government policies have on its citizen. As the Pandemic began in India, most of the experts clearly said that all restrictions, like lockdowns, are just to slow down the spread of the disease temporarily, so that the healthcare infrastructure doesn't get overburdened. It was understood that India needed to upgrade existing hospitals with more ICU beds and hospitals or build temporary shelters that could house and treat the new cases. It was understood that till everyone is vaccinated, the government needs to prepare for "waves" of infected people to manage the pandemic resourcefully. During the first wave, we had shortages of medical equipments, like ventilators, masks, medicines and PPE kits that needed to be urgently addressed. And it was, to some extent - the government procured these on a war-footing. India had the harshest lockdown in the world. It devastated our economy but on the plus side really reduced the impact of the first wave. Ventilator shortage did result in many death, but this was addressed. Then, after the first wave subsided, a combination of government hubris and the psychological fatigue of being in lockdown / house arrest led to both the government and the people fooling themselves into believing the worst was over. Elections were coming up in 5 states, and obviously selfish politicians want people to come to rallies and vote. So huge political rallies were allowed with restrictions (only on paper). The current right-wing power uses religious symbolism for politics, and thus also permitted the largest Hindu religious gathering - the kumbh mela. Again, social distancing and other restrictions were only on paper. Worse, unlike the Saudis who are only allowing vaccinated muslims to attend the religious Haj, there was no similar condition for the kumbh mela in India. These two events - the huge political rallies and the Hindu religious gathering at the kumbh mela became super-spreader events as millions attended those. This was one of the major policy failures of the Modi government. Now, remember, the experts had pointed out that we need to use lockdowns, and lulls between waves, to upgrade our healthcare infrastructure, right? India didn't. As the second wave rose, our hospitals again became overwhelmed and just couldn't handle the cases coming in. People were denied hospital admission and asked to wait for emergency beds till admitted patients were deemed fit to go home or died. Worse, a huge shortage of Oxygen in hospitals arose and thousands of people died due to lack of Oxygen. So people were not only being denied treatment but also died during treatment. The depressing irony - India is the largest producer of Oxygen and vaccine in the world! So how did India get in to such a situation of facing shortage of both!? The reason is the complete apathy of the government in planning and preparation. While we are the largest producers of Oxygen in the world, we only have 2000 trucks to transport them. Failure to plan and improve the logistics is one of the reason why many of the hospitals are now facing Oxygen scarcity, even though we have a surplus of it! Big Hospitals weren't also upgraded with oxygen plants. Our vaccination policy also wasn't well thought out. According to an opposition leader, we exported 60 million vaccines between January and March of this year, while we had only vaccinated around 30 to 40 million of our own people! Our vaccine plans also hit a hurdle when a US vaccine by Novavax, that has been licensed for production in India, is facing hurdles of getting the raw material for the vaccine from US (that has obviously prioritized it for its own needs). The government also had thoughtlessly blocked other foreign vaccines from being available in India, for political gains ("India is self-reliant"). We also exported around 1.1 million doses of Remdesivir to other countries. And our media is showing people desperate to buy Remdesivir from anywhere at any price. Yes, the pandemic is a natural disaster, but the disaster that is unfolding in India is largely man-made and will be a case study in the future in all colleges on what happens when proper planning isn't done and resources aren't utilised properly. Summary: We had all the resources. But apathy and poor planning screwed up India's fight against COVID.
lebuffon 5y ago
The history of theses things in India seems to be the track that Covid followed everywhere. Is it just human psychology that is the problem? 1st wave: everybody clamps down. R goes to < 1 2nd wave: people think it's over R goes >1, then clamp down again. 3rd wave: more of no. 2 but with a broader base of carriers across the nation. 3rd wave in India therefore will be really nasty based on other nations 3rd wave, unless their rapid vaccination plan gets a big percentage of the populace vaccinated over the next few months.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  I think there's some things that are pretty common. The exponential nature of the spread makes it so that things are getting very risky well before the risk is obvious or apparent. The payoff for avoiding a surge is pretty abstract. For a lot of people it ends up being that people they don't know don't get sick, and things like that. And then a year is a long time to deal with reduced socialization, we are social animals, "quarantine fatigue" isn't surprising in relation to that.
29athrowaway 5y ago
India was doing fine until they lowered their guard. Now it's out of control.
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: India’s second wave of covid-19 feels nothing like its first - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003228 - May 2021 (316 comments) How India went from a ray of hope to world record for most Covid cases in a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26916374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26916374 - April 2021 (122 comments) India's massive COVID surge puzzles scientists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898889 - April 2021 (152 comments) India’s second wave - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886829 - April 2021 (450 comments)
amriksohata 5y ago
For months a farmer protest has been going on against the government. None of the farmers were social distancing or told to be careful. It also didn't help when the opposition parties started putting doubt into peoples minds by calling the vaccine a "BJP vaccine" meaning many didn't want to take it. https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/its-bjps-vaccine-not-taking-the-shot-akhilesh-yadav/articleshow/80072610.cms https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/its-bjp... Dirty when you politicise people's safety.

54 points by dberhane 5y ago

"India Is What Happens When Rich People Do Nothing" https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/04/india-covid19-moral-failure/618702/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/04/in...

doopy1 5y ago
Good thing all the rich people saved us here in the US.
- newacct583 5y ago
  Not for lack of trying, to be perfectly honest. The US mitigation response kept the virus just barely under the disaster threshold, despite major figures in the federal government actively opposing most of those measures at one time or another. But the vaccines worked, so those rich people got it done. mRNA was a gamble, but it paid off with first trials starting just weeks after the virus was sequenced and first doses entering general patients in nine months instead of the 18 we were originally expecting. But let's not imagine that the US response wasn't otherwise a disaster, especially when compared to places like Australia and Korea who barely needed to wait for the vaccine at all.
  - hpoe 5y ago
    So I see people always pointing out SK and NZ and Australia as great examples of handling the virus but it seems to me that naturally controlling travel through an island* would be much easier to do anyway, also an island is unlikely to end up as a major throughfare? Could this factor into the difference at all? *I know SK isn't technically an island but for all practical purposes it is.
    - AnotherGoodName 5y ago
      A border policy helps stop infection coming in and internal mask+stay at home policies help when the infection is already in the city. Seoul, Sydney and Melbourne all had big outbreaks. The policies they took were effective in bringing the outbreak within the cities under control. So yes border control helps but you shouldn't also discount policies such as the 'hard lockdowns' https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53289616 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53289616 where people cannot leave there homes at all for any reason if there's known cases in the immediate area.
    - cmurf 5y ago
      Ok and where is the evidence the spread is significantly due to land border crossings? You really think the U.S. was being infected by Mexicans and Canadians? Refugees? That India is being infected by some or all the countries surrounding them? You must necessarily think these are illegal crossings because legal ones require COVID testing. All it takes is a critical mass of your own population getting it, followed by wide scale gathering of millions of people with no meaningful mitigations. That's the obvious and simple cause.
      - benjohnson 5y ago
        As I understand it, the current refugee crisis at the American southern border has a large Covid-19 component. This report says that at least one facility has a 10% infection rate. At the current time, in my opinion, The American border can't keep out any pandemic if our neighbors have it. And vise versa.
        newacct583 5y ago
        How does that square with both Mexico and Canada having significantly milder outbreaks on average? Objectively, aren't we giving it to them and not the reverse?
        benjohnson 5y ago
        Either way - an open border is rotten for pandemic containment.

maxerickson 5y ago

Some good news about the "double mutant", it doesn't appear to impact vaccine effectiveness (using antibody reactivity as a measure) more than either mutation alone. https://twitter.com/GuptaR_lab/status/1388422661018116097 https://twitter.com/GuptaR_lab/status/1388422661018116097

baybal2 5y ago
But it seem to be capable of infecting previously recovered people much more vigorously. People who got original covid strain may now be getting reinfected again.
- DiNovi 5y ago
  What's sad is we have enough evidence to show people they need a vaccine to prevent re-infection, yet it doesnt seem to move the needle for many where vaccines are plentiful
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Is this just anecdotal or ? Basically no theory about high prevalence of previous infection has survived the test of time, so I think to say something like 'infecting previously recovered people much more vigorously' takes some solid evidence.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    I was not concerned about all previous reinfection reports--- after all, anything will happen sporadically. But I believe recent immune-escape variants are a much higher risk here. Vaccines generate a much higher antibody titer and a much broader complement of antibody responses than natural infection, and still are noticeably less effective against emerging variants. Waning immunity also will contribute to this concern: reinfection gets more likely with time even without variants. I believe that even if one is reinfected, one is still partially protected against severe illness by the remaining antibody complements and other means, e.g. t-cell mediated immunity. Mind you, I don't think this is a huge absolute risk. I just think it's significant enough to be a significant confound for those of us trying to guess what Rt would be with a return to baseline behavior, and enough for people who've "had it" to be less protected than they might expect.

mulvya 5y ago

The wave isn't primarily due to loosening of restrictions or slack in behaviour. It's due to, for a lack of a better term, environmental factors. Look at the countries in the vicinity of India; they all show similar rise at around the same time. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/pakistan/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/pakistan/#... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/bangladesh/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/bangladesh... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sri-lanka/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sri-lanka/... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/maldives/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/maldives/#... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iran/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iran/#grap... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/kazakhstan/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/kazakhstan... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/azerbaijan/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/azerbaijan... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uzbekistan/#graph-cases-daily https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uzbekistan... ... COVID is seasonal: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.28.21252625v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.28.21252625v... Mumbai had the peak of its 'first wave' on October 7th. See mobility trends for vehicular and pedestrian traffic at https://covid19.apple.com/mobility https://covid19.apple.com/mobility. You'll see both monotonically increasing as the peak approaches and then recedes. If this were a simple morality tale of the level of social contact, this wouldn't be the case. See this paper for a more thorough look at the epidemiological mysteries of an infectious respiratory disease: https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-422X-5-29 https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-42...

Angostura 5y ago
Well, if you look at a comparison graph of the countries directly adjoining India, the differences are pretty stark. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=earliest..2021-04-29&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_cases_smoothed_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=BGD~IND~PAK~LKA https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

roenxi 5y ago

At some point people really have to stop trying to guess what is going on in real-time and adopt a more patient, evidence based approach. India is huge, the healthcare system is said to be collapsing and most of them don't speak English. We aren't going to get coherent reporting in the English press for a few months. On the other hand, if we're worried about variants then I hope there are some hard conversations happening about what the strategy here is. Part of what went wrong at the start of COVID around March 2020 was the reactive approach waiting for hard proof that the disease would slip through the borders before cancelling flights. This approach runs a risk that any action will be taken too late. To be honest, I'm confused by the amount of air travel that is still going on. If locking down large swathes of most countries is on the cards, why is there any air travel happening? Why was there a high profile diplomatic visit to India being planned? Are the benefits from all these plane trips really outweighing the costs? We may as well be trying to evolve COVID to sneak past quarantines. How is it acceptable to scuttle the economy in response to COVID, why are there still plane flights 12 months in to the pandemic? Someone fill me in on what I've missed; this seems to be not taking the situation seriously. Are these variants not going to be travelling between countries by plane and ship?

ghaff 5y ago
I'm constantly reminded that I clearly live in something of a bubble. I think I know a few people who took a plane to ride out the pandemic somewhere they saw as safer and one person who took an international trip to do some business. But that's about it. And a lot of people I know, including myself, practically live in planes normally. Yet, while air travel is down significantly, it's not that far down. Certainly not the 95% decrease it is in my circle.
- 0xdde 5y ago
  What makes you say that? While it may be rebounding now, there was a long stretch where it was down 95%, if not more, as evident from, say, https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput. I don't think other countries fared better.

mdani 5y ago

I visited India in Dec 2020, so here's my personal take on this based on what I saw. The first lockdown in India was very severe and it basically made the second lockdown pretty unpopular in the business community, at least initially. The dithering contributed to even bigger second wave. The reasons behind the lull between the first and the second waves were not entirely clear, and some people assumed that the herd immunity is being reached. Combined with the desire to return to normalcy after a harsh lockdown, it falsely assured people that the worst was behind them. This created the perfect conditions for a bigger second wave. Finally, the state and every petty official was intoxicated by the powers they weilded during the first lockdown, and they forgot that with great power comes the great responsibility. They unnecessarily focused on tiny things such as fining people Rs. 500 at the traffic lights, while not really understanding the new information on how virus spreads, what are the best ways to tackle transmission and so on. People should have been given the liberty to be outdoors with proper face covering when there was good airflow. They shpuld have known that meeting indoors with poor airflow was the biggest threat. This wasn't communicated properly. Some government officials did take decisions proactively to save their own district. For example, see here https://youtu.be/Sa4vCG1oY6M https://youtu.be/Sa4vCG1oY6M But unfortunately, this was the exception rather than the norm.

newsHere 5y ago
The Michigan governor had a similar issue. The lockdown was well intended, but when she opened casinos, bars, and restaurants but closed gyms, it was clear that safety was second priority. In politics you don't get credit for trying to be good, you only get credit for succeeding.
kshacker 5y ago
While the first lockdown may not have been popular, the top 3 reasons for the second wave were 1) muddled message from the top with massive election rallies and no one wearing masks, 2) the religious kumbh congregation was allowed to proceed as normal while a similar (in comparison, a smaller muslim congregation was demonized last year to the extent of jailing some folks), and 3) total lack of preparation of vaccines, drugs, and even oxygen. You only need the queuing theory to explain how systems can break down when the demand changes just a tiny bit. The complete celebratory attitude with a mild (covid) winter made them forget all the planning that they did not even order their vaccines (at least the numbers they needed). Just in case this seems like a critique of the government, let me add both the people and the government were irresponsible, but a cautionary message from top would have helped and that did not happen in time.

drumhead 5y ago

A combination of triumphalism and Stupidity. The govt there thought that they'd seen off the worst of pandemic and that they'd achieved herd immunity, so they didnt bother preparing for a second wave. Then politicans decided to hold massive election rallies, allow the largest religious festival in the world to go ahead and open up stadiums for sporting events.

k__ 5y ago
How come their second wave comes so late?
- ryandrake 5y ago
  What if it's early and we just don't know yet? Everyone acts as though "COVID is almost behind us" which is part of why we keep seeing these new waves. We are in such a rush to get back to normal at all costs, and keep doing it too early.
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    If people would spend more time outside in summer, destressing, getting vitamin D, improving their immunity etc. then we can expect the current cycle to end as respiratory infectious diseases tend to. The coercive measures by govs are pushing in the opposite direction.
    - hesarenu 5y ago
      But is there any evidence that spending time outside, vitamin d etc reduces covid. April and May are peak summer time in India. Most of the states are open not in lockdown mode, but cases are growing rapidly.
      - lambdaba 5y ago
        Haven't people changed their behavior though? Avoiding going outside, having fewer diversity in social interactions but longer durations, and indoors. There is definitely evidence for vitamin D, it's odd this is still not yet widely acknowledged, I can't say I reviewed the research myself but credible people have and have been spreading the information. I've definitely heard of some governments having taken measures for prevention with vitamin D, but there are also some results if administered early enough after infection. Vitamin D is essential for immune system function, but the wider picture is more complex with high vitamin D levels also correlating with better nutrition (diets higher in cholesterol, which is essential for hormone synthesis - is generally lower in people having severe forms), better immune system function (infections deplete vitamin D), and even activity levels (spending more time outside).

webmobdev 5y ago

As an indian, this Pandemic is an eye opener to me on the devastating impact that flawed government policies have on its citizen. As the Pandemic began in India, most of the experts clearly said that all restrictions, like lockdowns, are just to slow down the spread of the disease temporarily, so that the healthcare infrastructure doesn't get overburdened. It was understood that India needed to upgrade existing hospitals with more ICU beds and hospitals or build temporary shelters that could house and treat the new cases. It was understood that till everyone is vaccinated, the government needs to prepare for "waves" of infected people to manage the pandemic resourcefully. During the first wave, we had shortages of medical equipments, like ventilators, masks, medicines and PPE kits that needed to be urgently addressed. And it was, to some extent - the government procured these on a war-footing. India had the harshest lockdown in the world. It devastated our economy but on the plus side really reduced the impact of the first wave. Ventilator shortage did result in many death, but this was addressed. Then, after the first wave subsided, a combination of government hubris and the psychological fatigue of being in lockdown / house arrest led to both the government and the people fooling themselves into believing the worst was over. Elections were coming up in 5 states, and obviously selfish politicians want people to come to rallies and vote. So huge political rallies were allowed with restrictions (only on paper). The current right-wing power uses religious symbolism for politics, and thus also permitted the largest Hindu religious gathering - the kumbh mela. Again, social distancing and other restrictions were only on paper. Worse, unlike the Saudis who are only allowing vaccinated muslims to attend the religious Haj, there was no similar condition for the kumbh mela in India. These two events - the huge political rallies and the Hindu religious gathering at the kumbh mela became super-spreader events as millions attended those. This was one of the major policy failures of the Modi government. Now, remember, the experts had pointed out that we need to use lockdowns, and lulls between waves, to upgrade our healthcare infrastructure, right? India didn't. As the second wave rose, our hospitals again became overwhelmed and just couldn't handle the cases coming in. People were denied hospital admission and asked to wait for emergency beds till admitted patients were deemed fit to go home or died. Worse, a huge shortage of Oxygen in hospitals arose and thousands of people died due to lack of Oxygen. So people were not only being denied treatment but also died during treatment. The depressing irony - India is the largest producer of Oxygen and vaccine in the world! So how did India get in to such a situation of facing shortage of both!? The reason is the complete apathy of the government in planning and preparation. While we are the largest producers of Oxygen in the world, we only have 2000 trucks to transport them. Failure to plan and improve the logistics is one of the reason why many of the hospitals are now facing Oxygen scarcity, even though we have a surplus of it! Big Hospitals weren't also upgraded with oxygen plants. Our vaccination policy also wasn't well thought out. According to an opposition leader, we exported 60 million vaccines between January and March of this year, while we had only vaccinated around 30 to 40 million of our own people! Our vaccine plans also hit a hurdle when a US vaccine by Novavax, that has been licensed for production in India, is facing hurdles of getting the raw material for the vaccine from US (that has obviously prioritized it for its own needs). The government also had thoughtlessly blocked other foreign vaccines from being available in India, for political gains ("India is self-reliant"). We also exported around 1.1 million doses of Remdesivir to other countries. And our media is showing people desperate to buy Remdesivir from anywhere at any price. Yes, the pandemic is a natural disaster, but the disaster that is unfolding in India is largely man-made and will be a case study in the future in all colleges on what happens when proper planning isn't done and resources aren't utilised properly. Summary: We had all the resources. But apathy and poor planning screwed up India's fight against COVID.

lebuffon 5y ago

The history of theses things in India seems to be the track that Covid followed everywhere. Is it just human psychology that is the problem? 1st wave: everybody clamps down. R goes to < 1 2nd wave: people think it's over R goes >1, then clamp down again. 3rd wave: more of no. 2 but with a broader base of carriers across the nation. 3rd wave in India therefore will be really nasty based on other nations 3rd wave, unless their rapid vaccination plan gets a big percentage of the populace vaccinated over the next few months.

maxerickson 5y ago
I think there's some things that are pretty common. The exponential nature of the spread makes it so that things are getting very risky well before the risk is obvious or apparent. The payoff for avoiding a surge is pretty abstract. For a lot of people it ends up being that people they don't know don't get sick, and things like that. And then a year is a long time to deal with reduced socialization, we are social animals, "quarantine fatigue" isn't surprising in relation to that.

29athrowaway 5y ago

India was doing fine until they lowered their guard. Now it's out of control.

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: India’s second wave of covid-19 feels nothing like its first - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003228 - May 2021 (316 comments) How India went from a ray of hope to world record for most Covid cases in a day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26916374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26916374 - April 2021 (122 comments) India's massive COVID surge puzzles scientists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898889 - April 2021 (152 comments) India’s second wave - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26886829 - April 2021 (450 comments)

amriksohata 5y ago

For months a farmer protest has been going on against the government. None of the farmers were social distancing or told to be careful. It also didn't help when the opposition parties started putting doubt into peoples minds by calling the vaccine a "BJP vaccine" meaning many didn't want to take it. https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/its-bjps-vaccine-not-taking-the-shot-akhilesh-yadav/articleshow/80072610.cms https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/its-bjp... Dirty when you politicise people's safety.