elbows
Well-Known Member
You dont really need the detailed clinal studies by age and other risk factors to deal with the acute stage of a massive wave of hospital admissions.
A lot of the UK data we have now took a long time to come through, and some of the clinical picture, risk factors etc emerged with data gathered over the course of the first wave, it wasnt available in advance of our most difficult first wave period.
The data required in order to know where to direct help is much easier to ascertain, because it will be pretty obvious on the ground which hospitals are overwhelmed, where oxygen is needed etc. Thats quite different stuff to gathering the sort of data required to tell us if a particular outbreak, variant etc is showing a different age pattern.
When it comes to things like pandemic death statistics, India is not a country I would expect to have captured that picture very fully at any stage. But when it comes to some other aspects of public health, countries with 'old fashioned' health resoures were in some ways actually better placed to deal with certain aspects of infectious disease than certain 'modern' healthcare systems and approaches to public health. For example some of the UK fuckups at coping with this disease were due to a total lack of 'boots on the ground' approach to public health resources, most obviously when it came to contact tracing but really in some other areas too. However any gains on that front where the 'less developed' systems already had boots on the ground as part of their norm, dont really help when the wave has been allowed to grow very large. Systems of all levels of sophistication cant hope to cope in those circumstances, much of the detail goes out of the window and it becomes more like emergency fire fighting.
