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My correspondent in a small town in Rajasthan just explained that the reason India’s doing well is that the government is so great. :(

Does seem more likely that it’s herd immunity. So the opposite of lockdown. Which is interesting but you’d need the real covid-related death figures to know more.

I'm quoting this post from Feb 13th now to illustrate how quickly things can change, and also as a warning to anybody who has not learnt the cruel lessons about premature proclamations of herd immunity in this pandemic.

Not that the article linked to should have left people with the impression herd immunity had been reached there.

Not having a go at you bimble, I just cant help pointing out certain lessons that I think are key in this pandemic, and when I was searching for what we were saying about India earlier this year I could not resist highlighting that post.
 
I'd split the herd immuntiy lesson into three parts. Firstly be aware how many agendas make use of made up herd immunity claims. Secondly dont use it as a source of hope if you see data that implies 30% or 50% of people have antibodies, just resist the temptation, the threshold is expected to be much higher than that. Thirdly when we actually reach a point where experts tell us the herd immunity threshold has been reached, we still need to wait and make sure the expected protection is really there, and that it isnt scuppered by new variants, waning immunity or unknown factors. Hardly anywhere in the world has reached the point of testing that third part yet, apart from Manaus in Brazil which then suffered catastrophe.
 
Would it be terribly wrong for me to enjoy the schadenfreude of a racist sexist antivaxxer republican Trump supporting clown like Ted Nugent getting covid?

He calls it the "Chinese shit"

So yes, no fucks given.

No you are not wrong at all! :D

The Independent: Ted Nugent tests positive for coronavirus after calling pandemic a ‘scam’.

 
please could someone tell me what this bit means from the artricle below?
It says "In the space of just 12 days, the Covid positivity rate doubled to 17%, while in Delhi it hit 30%."
What does that mean, covid positivity rate.
It cant be, surely, that 3 in every 10 people in the capital have covid right now, can it. Anyway how would they even know?

The news from india is making me feel that this thing will not be over until maybe 2023, like in 1918-2020 with that second wave variant. Whilst goodwill & patience (here and elsewhere ) will probably barely stretch into early June .
 
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Been reading more about India. The more I read and the more I think about it the more worried I get about this outbreak.

India has turned into a model of what happens if you don't fully lockdown during a pandemic. This is especially true when everyone lives in extremely close conditions. I'm surprised Delhi has gone past Mumbai. Mumbai population has a staggering 20 million people in an area of just 603 square km. If you've ever been sometimes it's hard to stand more than 1m from anyone in the street.

They are running out or have run out of oxygen.
There are no beds
People are dying waiting outside the hospital
People are dying trying to find a hospital
People are dying trying to find oxygen
They are running out of medication
They can't cremate or bury the dead fast enough.

The graphs are pointless as they don't have the testing capacity, just think of a vertical line, you'd be as correct as any official statistics. 1.4 people a second are dying there.
Their version of the virus has out-competed the Kent, SA and Brazilian variants in 2 months. There is already talk of vaccine escape on this variant.

The most worrying for me is this statement from a doctor in Mumbai from this article ‘The system has collapsed’: India’s descent into Covid hell

Thadhani said this time around the virus was “much more aggressive and much more infectious” and was now predominately affecting young people. “Now it is people in their 20s and 30s who are coming in with very severe symptoms and there is a lot of mortality among young people,” he said.

Under 45's aren't vaccinated here.

Among the worst-hit cities in Uttar Pradesh was Lucknow, where 22-year-old Deepti Mistri – a mother of one who had no pre-existing health conditions – was among the city’s dead, after falling ill with Covid on 14 April.

She was 22, got symptoms and died 5 days later.

Currently, 5% of Indian people flying back are testing positive. There was a flight from India to Hong Kong 4th April, 188 people, all tested "negative" before boarding. 53 tested positive in HK's strict 3-week quarantine procedure. That's over 25% infection rate on a single flight on the 4th of April. I suspect the negative Indian testing can easily be purchased for a lot less than having the test.

Our borders to India don't close till Friday. WTF are we doing?
Are we going to get the 3rd wave in the UK in the summer due to this variant?
Here's a newspapers cartoon from the 19th century, welcoming Cholera to NYC (Dr John)

1619041314535.png
 
When India's infection rates appeared so low, for months, such that everyone was talking about it, could that possibly be because the new strain wasn't being picked up by the tests or what?
 
When India's infection rates appeared so low, for months, such that everyone was talking about it, could that possibly be because the new strain wasn't being picked up by the tests or what?

I don't think so, PCR & LFT tests have been picking up new variants all the time, across the world, just as covid in general, rather than it being a specific new variant.

More likely down to a combination of lack of testing, and the fact that this far more infectious variant has only been around for a fairly short time period, but taken off very, very quickly, as the Kent variant did.
 
I don't think so, PCR & LFT tests have been picking up new variants all the time, across the world, just as covid in general, rather than it being a specific new variant.

More likely down to a combination of lack of testing, and the fact that this far more infectious variant has only been around for a fairly short time period, but taken off very, very quickly, as the Kent variant did.

I think its even eclipses the Kent variant, for a country that is low on tests, I think that upswing is about one month wide.
Anyone's guess at the real number. Any infectious disease that's unknowingly transmitted in close contact in a country where people are really close together is in trouble.

1619081521362.png
 
This FT analyst reckons the true death toll in India is 10 times official figures, putting deaths at close to 20,000 a day.

View attachment 264379

In western countries where we have the medical capacity and wealth to lock down the nation, the % death from catching covid-19 is 0.7%
This FT analyst reckons the true death toll in India is 10 times official figures, putting deaths at close to 20,000 a day.

View attachment 264379

I think we can safely say this is already a catastrophe and it's only 60 days since they started noticing this variant.
Delhi is pretty much out of Oxygen. More is on the way but if you're on a ventilator and it runs out of oxygen, you die.

I see China is offering to help, I think it's possibly the only country with enough resources to make an immediate dent.
I hope the USA will stop blocking the bags they cultivate vaccines in, there are only 2 companies that make them and they are both in the USA and the US is preventing exports.
 
My heart goes out to India, it's seriously in covid hell. :(

More hospitals running out of oxygen, and reduced to appealing on twitter for supplies.




Crematorium struggling to deal with demand.

Families are also waiting hours to perform funeral rites, Reuters news agency reports, with at least one Delhi crematorium resorting to building pyres in its car park in order to cope with the numbers arriving. Crematoriums are holding mass cremations, and working day and night in several cities.

"During the first phase of coronavirus, the average here was eight to 10. One day it reached 18. But today the situation is very bad. Last night we cremated 78 bodies," Jitender Singh Shunty, who runs a crematorium in northeast Delhi, told Reuters.

"It is four times more frightful, this coronavirus... Many bodies are around, waiting. We have no place left in the crematorium to cremate them. Very bad times, very bad times," he added.

BBC Link

And, massive under reporting of covid deaths, that some reports suggest are running at up to ten times the official figures of over 2,000 a day.

In Lucknow, the capital city of India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, the official number of Covid deaths between April 11 to April 16 stood at 145. However, just two of the city’s main crematoriums reported more than 430 or three times as many cremations under Covid-19 protocol in that period, according to eyewitnesses and workers, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to reporters. This doesn’t account for burials or funerals at other smaller cremation grounds in the city.

In the industrial city of Surat, located in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, the head of a trust that runs crematoriums said at least 100 bodies have been brought in each day for the last 10 days, wrapped in the Covid-mandated protective covering. Surat’s municipal body on April 19 reported only 28 virus deaths.

Sanjeev Gupta, a freelance photojournalist in the central city of Bhopal, said he has consistently witnessed 80 to 120 bodies being cremated each day last week at just one of the city’s three cremation centers set aside for Covid cases. The official virus death numbers for the district were below 10 each day. According to news reports, the state government said the deaths were “suspected Covid” but couldn’t be confirmed because of a shortage of testing kits and lab facilities.

This article is hard to read, and frankly heart breaking. :(

 
I'm teaching lots of Indian students at the moment. If anyone questions why these people arrived, I can say that various UK universities told them they had to come to the UK by a certain date in order to continue their studies (even though the studies are still online for now.) They are also mainly failing to self isolate completely, as they need to buy food (and without a UK bank card, that's difficult).
 
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