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

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

#311

Germany has suspiciously lower death rates, too... And that's down to the superior healthcare infrastructure there? I was wondering if something similar was happening in India. I was expecting to read about it more from a therapeutic treatment point of view-- Is India doing anything differently that results in higher recovery and lower death rates?

The disease spreads exponentially. Germany's low death rate is probably due primarily to slowing the spread earlier. You don't need to treat infected people better to have fewer total deaths if there are fewer infected people.

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a painful cognitive dissonance that people seem to have about this disease. If your lockdown stops the spread of the disease, your population doesn't get immunity. No amount of infrastructure will allow the population to get immunity without all of the deaths that come with it. Absent effective medicines being developed, which are very unlikely to appear for a long time, countries need to consider that they'r…

Aside from the fact that the jury's still out on whether infection actually confers immunity with Covid-19, the options are not just "get everyone infected" vs "eternal lockdown", you can actually suppress the disease to a level where new infections are rare and easily enough traced, or even completely absent.

A lot of Asian countries are indeed showing that this is possible. That's good news!

Good luck trying to contain the flu that way. SARS-COV2 seems to be very virulent, but not so virulent like flu or measles that it can't be contained.

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

#313
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a painful cognitive dissonance that people seem to have about this disease. If your lockdown stops the spread of the disease, your population doesn't get immunity. No amount of infrastructure will allow the population to get immunity without all of the deaths that come with it. Absent effective medicines being developed, which are very unlikely to appear for a long time, countries need to consider that they'r…

German government declined the herd immunity strategy with the argument that for it to succseed in a year's time we have to increase the rate of new infections every day to 70k. No way our health care system can handle this. And there is also no need since we expect to have a vaccine ready in one year.

We have been told to expect a vaccine ready in about a year, but this seems to be based on wishful thinking. There's no guarantee any of these candidates will be any more successful than all the HIV and herpes simplex vaccines we've watched fail again and again for decades.

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't be including deaths in the Covid-19 total just because they involve similar symptoms. Lots of other problems cause pneumonia and cardiac arrest, and you said yourself that the pneumonia patients tested negative. Apparently healthy people die suddenly all the time, sadly.

The RT-PCR test apparently has a very high false negative rate; I've read up to 30% or even 40%. Also, they had all the other symptoms as well including fever and shortness of breath. One arrived in India with respiratory distress. The other fell ill a week after visiting a Covid hotspot -- Mumbai -- which he managed to visit despite a travel ban because he was a hotshot politician.

Where did you read that? Was it a reputable source that cited peer-reviewed data? We use RT-PCR every single day at our company (vaccine development) and we couldn't do our jobs if it performed so abysmally. The RT-PCR is the gold standard when it comes to detection.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India going all Wuhan on the virus. The difference between India and the US particularly is that it's lockdown lite in USA while it's full on there. You can't take a walk, you can't drive farther than 3 KM, cops will kick your butt and impound your vehicle. And the population by and large listens, while we have morons here who want lockdown eased to get haircuts.

there is no evidence for that whatsoever. You have absolutely no data on what takes place in India - it is a gigantic country with gigantic variation across. Plus the families are much larger, all confined together. When the train was shut down millions traveled back home for days on packed buses, it unlikely that any lockdown could have had such a pronounced effect so quickly. The truth probably lies elsewhere, perh…

If Spain had taken strict lockdown measures before the virus took hold they would not be in the mess that they are in now.

Compare Denmark to Sweden and it gets pretty obvious that early lockdowns have an effect

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand what part of my comment made you think I'm cold to their struggles. As I said, it's the minimizing choice of language and your choice to ignore a grammatical error. > I'm not the one mentally replacing at the expense of with in contrast to. As I said before you're ignoring the grammatical errors in that sentence and paraphrasing to suit your argument. > GP said and I quote, "at the expense of the…

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up. Fwiw, I didn't somehow interpret it purposefully in any sinsiter way or choose to ignore an error to start an argument. For some reason, that's just how I read it.

> Fwiw, I didn't somehow interpret it purposefully in any sinsiter way or choose to ignore an error to start an argument.

No worries, a lot of that was probably how it sounded in my head.

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

#317
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Western nations are doing fine. There's really just a dozen or so countries that have been hit hard, and even then the impact has been uneven within the hardest hit countries.

Who counts as a 'Western Nation'? [0] I think most people would assume Western Europe and the Anglophones (USA, CAN, AUS, NZ). If we assume that the US counts in the "hit hard" category, then we can partition western nations by per-capita deaths[1] like so: Hit Hard: Belgium, Italy, France, Spain, UK, Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, US Not: Portugal, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Norway, Finland, Icel…

You excluded a dozen or more nations that are part of the Western world and have not been "hit hard" by your metric. The "hard hit" nations list is an exclusive club, even when you add in the rest of Europe.

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can absolutely extinguish the virus if you have good border control. What makes you think you can't? The infection numbers exponentially decay toward zero when the replication rate is below one. At some point, the last infection recovers or dies without passing it on, and the virus is gone.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the impression, based on news articles at the time, that local officials were behind the initial coverup in Wuhan, lasting until national officials rectified the situation.

I'm not sure local officials would be behind all the censorship and police abuse that's happened like this: > Three Chinese citizen journalists have also gone missing after they uploaded videos showing a critical view of the situation in Wuhan to YouTube and Twitter. https://qz.com/1816219/chinese-internet-rallied-to-save-a-ce... > Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the softw…

Both of the articles you linked to mention local police, in Wuhan and Beijing.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Canada (west coast). No restrictions on driving. People are still taveling to their cabins on the weekend. They get yelled at by other people but are not breaking any laws. My neighourhood is full of elderly people walking their dogs. Bicylists are everywhere. Restaurants never stopped doing takeout. But we cannot get haircuts. Cops have stopped speed enforcement in my area, at least the dedicated speed traps.

The speeding has been happening all over the US too and it makes me sick. These people should be fined into oblivion, cars impounded, licenses revoked. Now is not the time to be creating extra problems for society.

Typical city dwelling urbanite bugman attitude. There's never been a time when people weren't speeding at every chance, and there's never been a safer time to do it. Pretty sure if you continue to hide in your apartment you'll be safe from the bad people who are driving faster than the 1950s norm.

LICENSES REVOKED, he says, SHOULD NEVER DRIVE AGAIN. You sound like an old church lady waving an umbrella.

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