Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 381 posts

Re: India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates

#21

Post by pmachinery »

i_have_to_speak wrote: post #2

Ah yet another cant-be-true-they're-hiding-something article? Surely they can't be doing better than developed countries? FWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indian…

The TL;DR is in the final sentence: "we don't know".

So many keystrokes and clicked bait on something nobody has any concrete insight into.

Re: India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates

#22

Post by notahacker »

i_have_to_speak wrote: post #2

Ah yet another cant-be-true-they're-hiding-something article? Surely they can't be doing better than developed countries? FWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indian…

The entire gist of the article isn't "it can't be true they're hiding something", it's "if statistics in the West are underreported which they likely are, why on earth would one believe they're not underreported in a country with far more limited access to medical care for much of the population where deaths from respiratory diseases are far more commonplace in normal times"

India's lockdown started the day after the UK, and whilst undoubtedly the government has taken some strong measures to make the lockdown viable, it also faced unique challenges like significant parts of the urban poor population attempting to return home to families in their villages. Of course, despite being later than Western lockdowns chronologically, India's lockdown was earlier with respect to the known spread of the disease, but that in itself is a phenomena worthy of explanation.

Re: India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates

#23

Post by [deleted] »

agumonkey wrote: post #5
i_have_to_speak wrote: post #2

Ah yet another cant-be-true-they're-hiding-something article? Surely they can't be doing better than developed countries? FWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indian…

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

[deleted]

Re: India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates

#24

Post by bhaavan »

garyclarke27 wrote: post #12

Poor article, not even a single mention of the most likely reason for low death rate (apart from young population), the weather! Strong Sun (UV light) and high humidity quickly kills the virus. Warm countries like Thailand - despite millions of tourists from Wuhan - have low death rates. In Spain cold Madrid was affected much worse than sunnier south. Summer will soon rapidly kill of the virus in southern Europe.

It doesn't "kill the virus". It reduces the half life of the virus, thereby reducing the time it has to spread from surfaces. This means the virus is less transmissible.

That alone cannot explain why deaths / infections ratio is low in India compared to the west. There are many hypothesis: - Higher testing in India - BCG vaccine immunity. None of these have been scientifically validated yet.

Re: India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates

#25

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

diminish wrote: post #9

Unfortunately UK government and Boris Johnson failed to take the pandemic seriously. This include BBC too. While the world was watching the kingdom with fear and awe, the establishment had a wandering attention.

Agreed re. Boris (but not about the BBC). Boris made easy decisions, not the right ones. He is expedient rather than well-judging, and he was too willing to treat politics as a game of 2 sides rather than trying to unify. Maybe he can learn from this.

Re: India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates

#27

Post by Lewton »

garyclarke27 wrote: post #12

Poor article, not even a single mention of the most likely reason for low death rate (apart from young population), the weather! Strong Sun (UV light) and high humidity quickly kills the virus. Warm countries like Thailand - despite millions of tourists from Wuhan - have low death rates. In Spain cold Madrid was affected much worse than sunnier south. Summer will soon rapidly kill of the virus in southern Europe.

Plenty of warm areas are being hit hard, but a lot of warm countries have "reporting issues" (look at the excess deaths in Jakarta for an example). Heat might lower R0 by some amount but it's still way above 1 without measures

Re: India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates

#28

Post by JackFr »

mkl wrote: post #15
garyclarke27 wrote: post #12

Poor article, not even a single mention of the most likely reason for low death rate (apart from young population), the weather! Strong Sun (UV light) and high humidity quickly kills the virus. Warm countries like Thailand - despite millions of tourists from Wuhan - have low death rates. In Spain cold Madrid was affected much worse than sunnier south. Summer will soon rapidly kill of the virus in southern Europe.

From the article: "Yet others talk about the possibilities of the presence of a less virulent strain of the virus in India, along with the possibility that its hot weather was diminishing the contagion. Both these claims are not backed by any evidence."

Yeah. And yet...

- The statistics indicate the contagion is diminished.

- No one knows why.

- Someone posits a plausible explanation of an effect seen in some (but not all) similar viruses.

- Explanation is dismissed without consideration, and the working theory us that the statistics are wrong.

Re: India coronavirus: The 'mystery' of low Covid-19 death rates

#30

Post by i_have_to_speak »

notahacker wrote: post #22
i_have_to_speak wrote: post #2

Ah yet another cant-be-true-they're-hiding-something article? Surely they can't be doing better than developed countries? FWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indian…

The entire gist of the article isn't "it can't be true they're hiding something", it's "if statistics in the West are underreported which they likely are, why on earth would one believe they're not underreported in a country with far more limited access to medical care for much of the population where deaths from respiratory diseases are far more commonplace in normal times" India's lockdown started the day after the…

When New York went in to lockdown, it had ~7000 cases (20th March) [1]

When UK went in to lockdown, it had 6700 cases. (23rd March) [2]

When India went in to lockdown, it had 657 cases. (25th March) [2]

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/20/politics/new-york-workfor... [2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Post reply on HN