It seems clear that India is under-reporting by at least 10×.
But, yes, you can never be quite sure of what you see on the news, because each channel selects interviewees (mostly by trawling fb and twitter for anybody who can string 3 words together) to suit the desired narrative.
For the Guardian, normally a bastion of left wing and “anti colonial everything” (India was a UK colony until c. 1947) to print such an article, things must be bad.
Peter wrote:
It seems clear that India is under-reporting by at least 10×
Reporting of ‘cases’ is always a bit tricky. But I would think that the reporting of fatalities should be reasonably accurate (certainly not off by a factor of 10).
Cobalt wrote:
Reporting of ‘cases’ is always a bit tricky. But I would think that the reporting of fatalities should be reasonably accurate
When the growth rate is so high, it depends on how they are being reported, and deaths will lag infections.
The UK reports “deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID test”, for example. This means deaths will be reported very quickly, but one or two might be from other causes. Some countries only report deaths with COVID somewhere on the death certificate. Others may only report deaths with COVID listed as the primary cause of death. Waiting for the death certificate will add another 10-14 days lag to the figures, and the numbers will be lower if you only report the deaths with COVID as the primary cause, rather than somewhere on the certificate.
Even if you report as the UK does, deaths will lag by 2 weeks the positive test result. If you report only after COVID was listed on a death certificate, then you need to add another 10 days to 2 weeks lag on top of this lag. (For example, the UK’s peak infections was on January 10th. Peak death rate didn’t occur until 15 days later, on January 25th, when the infection rate had already fallen by nearly a half).
The steeper the rise in cases is, the more it looks like deaths per 100k infected are lower if you are comparing today’s deaths with today’s infected figure. Most of today’s infected who are going to die won’t die for at least 2 weeks, and their death might not get reported for another 2 weeks after that. If you’re looking at proportion of deaths to infected, you have to compare today’s deaths with the number of infected from 2-4 weeks ago depending on how the deaths are reported. I don’t know how India is reporting deaths.
India’s death rate will look incredibly low if you compare today’s deaths with today’s infected, as India’s infection rate looks like a vertical cliff right now.
Absolutely! At the current growth rate in India a “factor of 10x” is just a 10-12 day time lag in reporting …
Mooney_Driver wrote:
And how far away were we from something like India here, if we had not implemented the measures we did….
Yes and no: India is kind of the perfect storm of high population density in many areas, a culture that doesn’t discourage close proximity of people, overall low hygiene and medical standards, on average low education and a government that that denied the pandemic (and science at all).
I had my second Moderna shot yesterday. After about 5 hours I felt very tired, but I’d timed the appointment with that possibility in mind, and it was 11 PM. I woke up a couple of times in the night and was aware that my joints ached, but by morning felt OK again. No issues going to work.
Two guys I work with felt nothing with the second shot, others I know took a day to recover. Interesting that the vaccine reactions are ‘all over the map’
Some news from the UK shows that BMI has a big effect on the chances of engine up in hospital (well we all knew that; it was obvious on Day 1) but the risk goes up a lot more steeply in young people – here
A healthy BMI is between 18.5 and 25 but the new study shows that for every point over 23, a person’s risk of hospitalisation from Covid increases by five per cent.
They are also ten per cent more likely than their slimmer peers to need intensive care treatment.
But the risk is more significant in younger adults and someone aged between 20 and 39 is nine per cent more at-risk of hospitalisation for every BMI point over 23.
They are also 13 per cent more likely to be admitted to ICU and 17 per cent more likely to die than if they had a BMI of 23 or lower.
In cultures where social life revolves around food consumption, and particularly where being “rounded” is desirable because it shows to all that you are wealthy, this is a real problem.
I’m guessing that some of the reason for the age effect is because an overweight young person is significantly more ‘unusual’ than an overweight old person.
By coincidence I think I read about that study of 1,705 Australian men in a piece by ‘MD’ in Private Eye* just this morning. It went on to discuss the UK’s vaccination experience and the role of sheer good luck in choices made in the face of desperation.
*IMHO Private Eye gets the ‘dirt’ years before the Daily Mail plasters it over a front page. The sub-postmasters’ miscarriage of justice is a good recent example.
This is what Turkey is now doing. No photo, so needs to be presented together with an ID card containing a photo. That would be an issue in countries where the carriage of an ID card is not mandatory (like the UK) unless it is to be used only for travel and only to places where a passport is required.
This week saw the first day where Germany vaccinated over a million people on one day (left y-scale is number of vaccinations in 1000, right scale is total number of vaccinations in million. Light blue is the first vaccination, dark blue the second/full)
