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

bbc.com

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

#131

Post by __s »

kolinko wrote: post #100
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.…

570 official cases in the city would mean 5-20 deaths. You most lokely wouldn’t noce those deaths on your street unless the street has 20% of the popularion of the city.

His comment is addressing thoughts about whether official numbers are off by a couple orders of magnitude

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

#132

Post by interestica »

muktabh wrote: post #88

Unlike what this article tries to subtly hint, there is no massive conspiracy theory stuff going on here. There are too many people in India (with smartphones and cameras and 3G/4G internet) to pull off anything covert. No one here views this as mystery but as a result of country's discipline in lockdown till now. The country imposed an early screening and tight lockdown and people followed it well till now.

> Unlike what this article tries to subtly hint, there is no massive conspiracy theory stuff going on here. There are too many people in India (with smartphones and cameras and 3G/4G internet) to pull off anything covert.

So you're saying there's no 5G?

Jokes aside, I would love a breakdown of all different hypotheses here and to revisit them in one year. (Eg therapies, heat/humidity effects, lockdown severity, lockdown timing, genetic factors, strain variations, etc)

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

#133

Post by interestica »

patrickaljord wrote: post #111
saalweachter wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the point is that treating the USA as some sort of unified region for statistical purposes is in itself problematic.

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

#134

Post by kumarvvr »

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…

Also, there are a few factors that are in favor of India. The number of international travelers between China and India is much lesser compared to European countries. I suspect this may have played a huge role in reducing the initial exposure.

Added to that, apart from major cities, international travelers are minuscule in the general population. Consequently, the largest group of exposed citizens are from Mumbai & Delhi. Other cities are relatively less exposed.

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

#135

Post by marcosdumay »

CivBase wrote: post #124
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…

A lockdown is not supposed to reduce the total number of cases; it is supposed to "flatten the curve" so those cases take a lot longer to develop. The intent is to drag the virus out for as long as possible so we can prepare our hospitals, develop more effective treatments, and get closer to a vaccine. A lockdown does not make the virus go away sooner; it prolongs it . According to the Johns Hopkins dashboard[0], Ind…

Obviously a lockdown can cause the number of cases to go down. There's no mystery here. There are many countries doing the same.

Yes, it is "supposed" to flatten the curve always keeping some manageable number of people infected. So if you reduce the number of cases any further you are doing it wrong; because no, you won't extinguish the virus, you'll only prolong the lockdown.

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

#137

Post by marcosdumay »

jatsek wrote: post #114

There's a chance that climate is on the India's side here. "High Temperature and High Humidity Reduce the Transmission of COVID-19" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3551767

Of all the large Brazilian cities, the one that is in a crisis due to the virus is the one with highest temperature and humidity.

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

#138

Post by marcosdumay »

paganel wrote: post #51
Lewton wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's also strong correlation inside the same countries regarding the more sun = less deaths vs less sun = more deaths. The best examples that I can give are Italy, where Rome and everything South of of it has ridden the pandemic wave pretty ok (with the slight exception of the region of Puglia) and Spain, where the region of Andalusia in the South has had only a 5% or so excess in the number of deaths for this yea…

In Brazil the correlation is going almost perfectly as more sun = more deaths.

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

#139

Post by barkingcat »

signal11 wrote: post #69
gspr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). What? Why are doctors being beaten up? I don't understand.

It's very stupid, but a (very) few people see them as potential spreaders of the disease. Public health workers going into the community to find infected people have also been attacked. Also, until recently, suspected COVID patients had to be in hospital -- no home isolation allowed -- and some of these patients (or their relatives) thought that venting their anger on doctors would help. Unfortunately, the law of lar…

In North American long term care facilities, this is exactly what's happening. In Canada, a ban was put in place to prevent health workers from working in multiple long term care facilities - it was found that infectious material was making its way via health workers from one home to another, all full of high risk populations.

Add in the fact that many hospitals in North America are short on PPE, and some are even preventing nurses and care personnelle from wearing PPE (or to bring their own, etc) - and you can see how much of an issue this can be.

Of course, beating up the doctors is a bad idea, but the roots of the idea that health workers are potential spreaders isn't all that far fetched.

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

#140

Post by barkingcat »

kranner wrote: post #84
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…

Apologies, I read that as extrapolation. Also assumed Hyderabad as that is the fifth biggest city in size, and cases are around the same in number.

uh ... India has so many cities, how can you assume any city unless the person says?
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