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

111–120 of 381 posts

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

#111

Post by patrickaljord »

saalweachter wrote: post #91
patrickaljord wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A better question from everyone outside the US: what the flying f is with the huuuuuge (accounting for estimated no. of infected and other factors) number of deaths in the USA??!!? That's only true if you don't know what "per capita" means. So far the US has 172 death per 1M population. That's better than other countries with supposedly better healthcare including: - Belgium - France - Spain - Italy - UK - Netherla…

NYC is currently at 1462 deaths per million.

The whole country of Spain is at 510 deaths per million. How high do you think their biggest hot spot is?

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

#112

Post by vbezhenar »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #96

I’m a (foreign) American citizen staying in India and happened to arrive here a few days before lockdown started. I don’t understand how this is a mystery: India quickly locked down the entire country and going outdoors was consistently punishable by police hitting people with sticks (thankfully it seems like the brutality has eased up since the start and police are doing things like making people write sorry on the…

Did you see police beating people yourself? I have a suspicion that it was made just for camera to scare people.

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

#113

Post by craftinator »

ignoramous wrote: post #105
ramraj07 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think I mentioned anything to generalize. Just what I observed in my city (Chennai) in my street. What I was implying is that perhaps things did go okay in terms of slowing the spread in India: of course, there's probably more spread than is being reported, but that seems par for course everywhere. I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of…

> I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks. Sorry, what? The lockdown isn't about the rich or the poor. It is mostly about containing a deadly disease we don't fully understand yet. It is for the medics but also mostly to keep the social fabric intact. No one wants this to descent into chaos and madness without controls in-place. A…

>> I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks.

> Sorry, what? The lockdown isn't about rich or poor.

I think you misunderstood the parent comment. They are worried that the poor will be more negatively effected by the lockdown than by the coronavirus, in contrast to the rich. This has been observed in other countries, where the poor have had no way to sustain themselves without work, whereas the rich can just hide inside and wait it out without a problem.

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

#116

Post by rezeroed »

kranner wrote: post #53
ramraj07 wrote: post #18

I can give some ground level information. I live in a very densely populated street (total length is just two hundred meters, my guess is at least a thousand people live here). No one is dying here without others noticing. Further, there's a great amount of scrutiny into whether anyone's sick (see the reports of doctors getting beaten up even by the cops). As far as I know, no one has died in this street in a month.…

I'm guessing you live in Hyderabad. Clearly your street is not a hotspot, and you really shouldn't be extrapolating from it to the rest of India. As far as people having it while being asymptomatic, that is unfalsifiable until they are tested.

He didn't extrapolate - the article is about the country, his comment is about his street, "on the ground".

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

#117

Post by charlzbryan »

thaway757383884 wrote: post #32
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…

I flew from India to the US in early February (2nd week). Indian airports were doing thermal checks on passengers (using tech that had been installed during the Zika virus scare a few years back, I believe). The newspapers also had info about how anyone found with elevated temperatures were being asked to self quarantine, and the police was also following up. The US had, absolutely nothing. Nada. Before the flight I…

Similar situation here. I travelled from Bangalore to the UK, around the first week of March, almost everyone at Bangalore airport had masks, workers had masks and gloves.

When I landed at Heathrow, not even immigration folks had masks

People in India took it seriously in the beginning

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

#118

Post by rezeroed »

ignoramous wrote: post #105
ramraj07 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think I mentioned anything to generalize. Just what I observed in my city (Chennai) in my street. What I was implying is that perhaps things did go okay in terms of slowing the spread in India: of course, there's probably more spread than is being reported, but that seems par for course everywhere. I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of…

> I'm only worried that the lockdown is going to significantly affect the poorer communities worse at the expense of richer folks. Sorry, what? The lockdown isn't about the rich or the poor. It is mostly about containing a deadly disease we don't fully understand yet. It is for the medics but also mostly to keep the social fabric intact. No one wants this to descent into chaos and madness without controls in-place. A…

"can be disastrous for a country as dense as India and for incubation periods as long as they are for a rabidly contagious SARS-CoV-2."

Isn't the whole point of the article that this isn't the case?

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

#119

Post by thehappypm »

nnq wrote: post #50

A better question from everyone outside the US: what the flying f is with the huuuuuge (accounting for estimated no. of infected and other factors) number of deaths in the USA??!!?! I mean, the US is (a) a developed country with modern health-care, (b) there is no common 'old parents living in same home with some of the adult children' situation you have in Italy + Eastern Europe, (c) there are no norms of common phy…

Compare the US to the EU as a whole and you’ll see that the two are doing pretty similarly.

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

#120

Post by chrismorgan »

I know of an old man who died last week in an area a short way out of Hyderabad. That area was a Red Zone (presumably due to COVID-19 cases near it), so movement in and out of the area was very much more restricted even than usual. A couple of days before he died, they tried taking him to hospital, but were told that the hospital had no doctors there that could help. Next day ditto. It was only hours before he died that they let him in at all.

In this case there’s a fair probability that he would have died anyway (probable generic cause of death: old age), and there’s no reason to suspect any connection with COVID-19 in his death. But you can definitely have deaths indirectly caused by the coronavirus, because doctors are busy dealing with other things, or even can’t get to the hospital due to lockdown!

Post reply on HN