This article notes that opposition political parties are trying to leverage the new wave of cases to attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but that just seems like an opportunist political tactic. Reading this article and others, this situation sounds like bad luck and tough circumstances more than anything else. Some of the approaches being taken there seem far more restrictive than anything I've seen in the US:
> For example, apartment buildings where people test positive for the coronavirus have been sealed off, with no one allowed to enter or exit. Police patrol their perimeter. In India's two biggest cities, Mumbai and Delhi, local lockdowns are already in place. Only essential travel is allowed, with a permit. Everyone except for front-line workers have been told to work from home. Residents aren't allowed to go for a stroll or jog, or they'll be fined.
It seems that Modi previously had announced a charitable policy of exporting half of India's vaccine doses to other countries that need it. One article (https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/indias-vaccine-com...) notes that over 60 million doses have been exported, and 52 million were administered to Indians. Another article (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/jugglebandhi/vexin...) notes that India even donated vaccines at no charge to some countries. I'm sure Modi is facing immense pressure to focus on Indians first, and some articles note that they've temporarily paused exports, but their export approach hardly seems like it deserves blame as much as applause.
India is the world's largest vaccine producer, and while they pursue a charitable strategy, they're themselves facing export constraints from countries like the US. India's Serum Institute (world's largest vaccine manufacturer) has asked Joe Biden to relax export constraints for vaccine components (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-global-trade-india-coro...). While many are using this moment to find a way to critique India's handling of the virus, it makes me feel bad as an American to see others attempt to be generous leaders for the world while we do the opposite. I don't think anyone is "evil" for putting their nation first - but putting COVID to rest requires we eradicate it worldwide.
All countries that did well during the pandemic did a few steps:
- immediately recognize the risk and call on domestic producers to increase mask production
- freely, easily and regularly distribute masks to everyone, either for free or subsidize
- rigorous regulation (not necessarily lockdown) of mask usage in places with either centralized(china) or decentralized(taiwan) contract tracing in every building.
- a leadership that publicized and communicated the risks regularly
- a leadership that led by example by wearing masks themselves
- and a population that had some sort of sense of unity(common enemy)
ALL countries that downplayed the pandemic ended up with second or third waves. I don't understand why you think it's bad luck.
I think "did well" is a spectrum. Some countries chose to enact very authoritarian lockdowns, and achieved success that way. Others balanced between freedoms and restrictions. Still others have to work within the bounds of their political system - what their laws permit and don't permit.
From some quick web searches, it seems to me that India did many of the things you mentioned. I'm not sure if they did all of them, or to what extent they did each one - understanding that precisely is probably not possible without being involved in those particular actions. But it doesn't seem to me like they did nothing.
> ALL countries that downplayed the pandemic ended up with second or third waves.
Do you think India downplayed the pandemic? I don't get the sense given that they did building by building lockdowns and have police patrols ushering people back into their homes. We should keep in mind that each country is different - they have different population sizes, city densities, wealth levels, infrastructure quality, Internet access, cultural priorities, and so on. China is not India - it has an authoritarian governmental system. Taiwan is not India - it's small and rich and is an island. I'm not sure these comparisons are fair.
>
I think "did well" is a spectrum. Some countries chose to enact very authoritarian lockdowns, and achieved success that way
And other countries had fourteen months of rolling half-assed lockdowns, and have achieved a few million sick, with tens-to-hundreds of thousands dead.
At this point, I can't imagine who in their right mind would prefer what we got, compared to one hard lockdown that solved the problem, requiring only minimal follow-up measures.
Because getting one disease doesn't mean you get to condemn the rest of the public to misery? Look at what makes people vulnerable to Covid and you'll understand.
What does your response have to do with the quote? It's a clear straw man.
New Zealand and Australia likely won't open until 2023 because vaccination campaigns are slow and public health authorities are afraid of variants. I'm perfectly fine with people in these countries making those decisions. I just think they should be a little more understanding about the rest of the world that prefers open borders to hysteria.
> Patients with heart attack symptoms and spinal injuries are being forced to wait in ambulances outside hospitals for as long as five hours in what paramedics and the Australian Medical Association have described as a deadly public health emergency.
> Ambulance response times are at their worst since 2016-17 and Ambulance Victoria has instigated emergency protocols – where patients can be instructed to take taxis to hospital instead of waiting for ambulances – three times more this year than in the previous two years combined.
I've been reading a lot about how NZ's health system is overwhelmed too.
I am allowed to criticize other nations just as you have criticized the US. Debate is allowed here.
You answer seems very mask focused. Masks are good but my unexpert opinion of why things went well here include more;
- We had strict lockdown early.
- We has free and fast readily available testing. Generally fast both for walk in and get swabbed plus results back in less than 24hr both times I had a cold so got tested.
- There was restricted travel, so states locked themself off from other states. This I feel had a double effect as some state leaders were US style 'cant hurt the economy' and trying to keep things open. The lockdown states essentially erraticated covid and went back to normal while keeping the other states with covid locked out. This put pressure on less strict states to deal with covid more effectively + stopped them spreading across the country via their lack of containment.
- Keeping covid levels low allows contact tracing teams to work effectively on mini outbreaks and be effective. Essentially once overwhelmed govt can't deal with the issue well.
- We have fast and short lockdowns as soon as there are any cases to restrict spread, these lockdowns tend to be regional or state so only parts of the country are effected.
- Our population has largely supported government. Recently my state of QLD had a lockdown and people distanced in shops and wore masks without question or complaint for about 2 weeks even though there was only a handful of cases. Now it's gone and life is normal. These people online that scream about govt trying to control you seem so stupid... Deal with it quickly and you are more free.
Anyway, loads more detail and while I agree masks are great tool for COVID, I think the lockdowns, testing, keeping it under control initally and fast reactions are worth recognising as key components.
You're right on the benefits of a combined strategy right from the government to personal responsibility by citizens. Indians complied with most of these in the early phases of the pandemic but got complacent later on. I wrote about some of this in my visit late March - https://rahulrevo.substack.com/p/indias-covid-conundrum. India is also very complex because of the diversity and scale.
After this second wave is done, people will be more compliant again towards covid-safe behavior at least for a short term. Ultimately a large section of the population will need to be vaccinated to meaningfully end the pandemic.
There is a start at opening up borders with safe countries (currently Au and NZ) and free travel between them. I’m not sure anywhere else has achieved this.
I’m in New Zealand and saw your lockdowns as very soft compared to ours. Here almost zero shops were open - supermarkets and some dairies. Medical practices and pharmacies were open. One could not associate with anyone outside their household.
However Australia’s approach worked. It does make me wonder if ours was too strict.
Honestly I don’t think masks have been the key to success in those places that did get down to zero. Instead, the key seems to have been:
* Border controls. Including internal borders in large countries.
* Tests
* Lockdowns implemented when needed and kept till cases zero, then lifted. These can be really short if you do it with small caseloads
* Acting fast with whatever action they take. No wait and see.
Masks are a great complematary tool, and they help limit the damage of reintroductions when they do happen. But if everyone wore masks but travel were open and testing was insufficient, you’d have plenty of covid.
Also strict border controls with supervised hotel quarantine. The formula is:
1. Implement border controls so few/no cases get in
2. If you already have an outbreak, do a lockdown (possibly targeted to a city or province)
3. Once you have few cases, aggressively test/trace. This is not possible with lots of cases.
If you have an open border though, this won't work, because you're going to import lots of cases, and those people, by the nature of being travelers, are going to be staying in hotels, eating in restaurants, taking public transit, exposing lots of people. They then leave the country and so are hard to contact trace.
If you look at the countries that have the fewest per capita deaths, they essentially universally implemented early border controls with supervised quarantine for arrivals. Everyone talks about SK, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, but there are lower income countries that succeeded with this too like Vietnam. Rwanda has also done very well with a requirement that arrivals test on arrival and undergo supervised quarantine for 24 hours while waiting for test results.
The Serum Institute of India was basically contracted by Astra Zeneca to make doses for Covax. The Indian government had never placed a substantial order or prepaid for an order to the SII in order to ramp up production until the numbers started spiking. The SII at one point was running out of storage space so they resorted to selling to western countries at higher margin to free up some space and get more capital.
Regarding the raw materials export ban I agree we should share but I wonder if it is just supply constrained. I've read even in the US they have washed and reused single use filter bags to extend life. I've read that despite the US not exporting AZ vaccines, AZ was exporting vaccine liquid to Europe to overcome their shortfall in production.
Thanks for this info. That was part that always confused me about India and SII. I couldn't believe that they were exporting vaccines a while back. It just didn't make sense to me given the size of India's population. The only explanation I could think of was that they were being overly altruistic. My more cynical friends said maybe SII was being overly capitalistic. But your explanations makes more sense.
I would say SII is pretty capitalistic. Its charging $8/dose in India vs $3-4/dose that AZ is charging in US and EU. And that is before any markups in public hospitals from what I hear. And remember SII got $250M from Bill Gates and didn't have to do vaccine development like Oxford/AZ. The Covaxin vaccine developed in India is even more expensive but they had to do their own development.
Sorry that is misinformation. The article you have quoted is also completely incoherent. What is the point of comparing dates of when India placed first order with when UK targets complete vaccination ?
- The Indian government had never placed a substantial order or prepaid for an order to the SII in order to ramp up production until the numbers started spiking.
India had placed order for 14M vaccines in January. an by March 16 had placed order for around 120M vaccines. Cases spiked after that.
- The SII at one point was running out of storage space so they resorted to selling to western countries at higher margin to free up some space and get more capital.
The space has nothing to do with the exports. SII is obligated to export vaccines as per their licensing terms with AZ. (Indian government might engage in coercion and prevent them from honoring it, but that is a different tale).
This article is some kind of shoddy job of stiching unrelated facts to create a story.
Indian government made a major goof up. They put unreasonable price controls on the vaccine manufacturer and harassed a lot of people involved in the process. With low price controls there was no way for SII to raise capital, not to mention their gamble of stockpiling vaccines did not pay off because of that. Indian government passed down the responsibility of subsidizing the vaccine to SII instead of taking it on itself.
Some government folks even openly wondered why GoI should even bother paying SII. This is the old socialist mentality.
Anyone who is living in India knows that cases are severely underreported in India. Government is publishing statistics saying city a has x covid deaths in a day. But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags.
You don't even have to believe me. Just look up covid deaths for your city and then go to the city's largest crematorium and count the number of bodies in covid body bags.
(I know you just posted a tl;dr of the article and this is not necessarily your opinion.)
> Anyone who is living in India knows that cases are severely underreported in India. Government is publishing statistics saying city a has x covid deaths in a day. But crematoriums are seeing 10-20x body bags.
What would be the incentive for India's government to do this?
That was my first thought as well but wouldn't that same logic apply to other countries as well? If not, why is this intentional suppression of COVID cases happening in India and not other countries like the United States and United Kingdom? At what point does the comparison of COVID cases between countries become meaningless as a result of countries manipulating the data they report?
Cause that has been massively under reported. The real numbers are at least 10 - 15 times than whats been shown. There are crematoriums where a hundred bodies get burnt in a day and yet the official count stands below 10. And this is just 1 crematorium in one city. Extrapolate this for the entire country and then you'll realize whats actually happening.
Yes this is undeniably true. No matter the extent of infections, all states are under reporting. But some are going extreme. When the furnaces have melted because of continuous body burning and the state reports 20 deaths in the entire state for the day then we know its a massive cover up
yes I agree with the data fudging, however I'm just asking for some restraint in extrapolation. One anecdote of furnace melting does not mean we're in hell. I'm saying this not out of some misplaced sense of patriotism, but that these are incredibly hard times and its easy to spiral into more fear mongering and FUD.
However I'm not defending anybody in this mess. From the US and EU blocking patent waivers to India's government being chronically under capacity, to having people fly to Maldives for late last year. This is a cluster fuck of how stupid humans are at the end of the day.
Please donate whatever you can, we'll get out of this mess.
> One anecdote of furnace melting does not mean we're in hell.
-- This was one anecdote by me here. In reality its all over the news.
-- There are literally thousands and thousands of SOS tweets asking for hospital beds, O2 cylinders and Meds all over the country. Its even live right now.[1] Are you not on social media?
What do you mean "easy to spiral into more fear mongering and FUD" ?? This is literally explaining whats happening and asking for some accountability is somehow bad?. If this is isn't talked about today then when is it going to be fixed?
There are hospitals sending people back because they don't have oxygen supply!
I have lost 2 of my friends and I'm insanely angry at the appalling conditions that I see. Please don't go around asking people to not talk about problems cause it may induce fear!!
Yes i'm from Tirupur, TN. I'm only asking to assume not blindly believe. I'm looking at the various reports from Financial Times and BBC. The hotspots are not uniform but the data fudging is happening at a large scale in the country.
I dont think you're understanding the urgency or the scale of the catastrophe. People are dying the streets waiting for hospital beds. The doctors are breaking down because of their helplessness. What exactly do you mean by cooler heads? Isn't the apathy shocking?
That situation is specific too, even in my place in uttrakhand(hilly areas) for 40sqkm, area where we have relatives and where we talk in often, very few cases of death have come up. For testing is low can't comment on covid cases but death rate hasn't been much here and situation isn't scary as its shown on mass media channels.
Me now living in rural areas now can say, it better here than urban areas which I initially thought due to lack of health infrastructure would suck, but people have started working on making beds and health infra incase this waves comes to our villages.
The per capita numbers had a 20x rise over the interval, too, so the per capita numbers are just as good as the totals for conveying that point, and they are better for comparing to other countries. Hence, articles like this one should use per capita numbers.
> so the per capita numbers are just as good as the totals for conveying that point, and they are better for comparing to other countries.
No they're not, because India is in the middle of a case explosion right now. That's a completely different situation than a country with awful per-capita numbers but a low-slope linear growth (like france).
That's not saying france has handled this well (they have not, at all), but next week odds are France will still be seeing 40k cases / day, while India could be closing in on a million.
But you can see that explosive growth equally well in the per capita numbers. The total number is just the per capita rate multiplied by a different number in every country, so there are very few occasions where it is useful to choose it over the per capita rate.
I'm not sure I agree. The title indirectly makes a comparison to other countries, so I agree with you that per capita might be better for that, but the actual article isn't really about how India is doing compared to other countries.
The article really talks about how India is doing in comparison to how it was doing a few months ago and then paints a picture of how dire the situation currently is. I think the raw numbers actually do a better point of getting both those points across.
Did largest gathering of humans in the world - Kumbh Mela, which I think is still happening, played a big part in this spike?
I mean folks come from all around India into 1 super-duper-massive gig of high density, they largely ignore any safety measures including masks (at least from photos I saw), and then happily go back home. Sounds like the best way possible to spread virus literally across whole subcontinent.
Even without any new indian variant spreading, this must have left some significant effect on the numbers.
We know that deaths lag, on the linear graph active cases are skyrocketing but deaths are just starting to ramp back up. And reports are coming in of lack supply scarcity.
> A few months ago the US had a few days > 4K:
Note that this was with 9 million active cases (official). According to official numbers, india is at 2.5, yet already reaching 2200 daily deaths.
And if you look at the correlation between daily deaths and active cases, the daily death maximums occur around the inflexion point in case growth (either peaking for the 1st and 3rd surges, or plateauing of the 2nd).
The same occurred in India with their first wave (active cases peaked mid-september, so did deaths). Right now it's shooting straight up, they've already smashed through the US' maximum daily new cases, and the US reached theirs as the DNC's increase was slowing down.
> And reports are coming in of lack supply scarcity.
We are now well over a year into this pandemic. The original justification for the lockdowns in the US was "15 days to slow the spread," i.e. that we would self quarantine to buy time to add ICU capacity, secure PPE and supplies for hospitals, etc. Instead ICU capacity was kept flat and economy-wide hospital staff were reduced and we were told "nope, keep doing this until we have a vaccine."
Is there a single country in the world that has actually beefed up ICU capacity and secured basic supplies like oxygen for itself?
A lot of deaths could be going un-reported. There could be multiple factors here:
* India doesn't count everyone who died with COVID as having died of COVID.
* There is something fishy going on with the number of cremations with "COVID protocol" compared to the number of reported COVID deaths on a day in multiple states
* Just not enough infrastructure to handle this kind of situation
> Confirmed deaths from the coronavirus also broke an Indian record Thursday, with 2,104 fatalities recorded in the previous 24 hours. But deaths too may be drastically undercounted, because many of the people dying outside hospitals never got tested.
Measures of death in India have always been hard even before the pandemic, most are not recorded. I highly doubt that the current death count in India is anywhere as low as the official number.
In 1918 Spanish flu time, 5% of India died from what I read.
Again, this is another instance of the descending world's needless doom and gloom portrayal of nations of the ascending world. India's human scale is enormous, while the case rates have been increasing at an alarming rate, India has the pharmaceutical infrastructure to deploy vaccines in billions scale. The Serum institute of india has been the world's largest producer of vaccines and has selflessly helped out countries like brazil during their worst times.
All this when some nations have imposed strict restrictions on the export of raw materials for producing vaccines, their own infra crumbling, selfishly procuring 10x the number of vaccines than necessary etc.,
Yes. This is an important point to note. USA is sitting on 30M pile of AstraZeneca vaccine which is not even approved in USA. They could have simply sold it to India.
USA is also stockpiling, glass, containers and other raw material which USA is not technically short of.
On top of this German Chancellor yesterday said that "we allowed India to become a pharma powerhouse but now we have to rethink". This is because India is producing cheaper vaccine.
> On top of this German Chancellor yesterday said that "we allowed India to become a pharma powerhouse but now we have to rethink". This is because India is producing cheaper vaccine.
They are worried the surge in India will delay shipments to the EU. The EU wants cheaper vaccines! That's why they took so long to negotiate the contracts. They thought a vaccine wouldn't be produced in record time and because of that they felt they had a lot of time to negotiate.
> “We now have a situation with India where, in connection with the emergency situation of the pandemic, we are worried whether the pharmaceutical products will still come to us.” [0]
To me this shows how hard to predict the whole thing is. Germany did well for a long time and suddenly they got hit like everybody else. Same for India. Seems the only countries that keep doing well are the ones with super strict lockdowns and quarantine. Everybody else gets hit sooner or later.
Yeah, and the Czech Republic, which used to be the big European success story which proved everyone else should be able to do better, ended up with the most Covid-19 deaths per capita in Europe (maybe in the world, can't remember). So many confident predictions failed and then were quietly forgotten.
Specifically, the Czechs were praised for their early and aggressive mask mandates and compliance rates, which were credited with keeping their infection rate lower than European neighbors.
It's almost like these interventions can't be maintained indefinitely and are therefore stopgaps at best. With the CDC's own study saying masks reduce transmission by all of 2%, I doubt it was lack of mask wearing that made the difference.
It's "percentage point change," which I read as absolute percentage points. It's different from you what said, "masks reduce transmission by all of 2%," but it also looks like a garbage number because you can't average percents like that and get meaningful data, and the result is hard to interpret. If masks drop the growth rate by 2 percentage point, two percentage points from what?
South Korea and Taiwan had super strict lockdowns and quarantine? It was my understanding that they were in fact successful through high testing volume, excellent contact tracing, proper masking up, and targeted lockdowns/quarantine.
They have none of the mental blocks the "West" tends to suffer from when it comes to weighing "individual freedom" vs collective action.
The West needs to take a long look at itself in the mirror, seeing as some of its fundamental ideas are inadequate when dealing with a blind, pure-numbers threat that only cares about statistics.
I'm not saying some of the collectivist excesses seen in some parts of the "East" are okay, but the other extreme turns out to be maladaptive, too.
You know what's funny, when I look back at that old WWII media, America was pushing an awful lot of "civic responsibility" messaging on people. My father, God rest his soul, used to tell me recalling that all young men really were embarrassed about not having a good excuse not to be enlisted. There were the freedom gardens, scrap metal collections, war bonds... This isn't to glorify war or anything, but just to note that there was a time when we did all work toward the greater good.
Yes, the pathology of "freedom" is somewhat more recent, at least in terms of its extreme intensity.
My gut feeling is that it can be traced back to Ayn Rand & Co, but it's hard to say. But around that time, and near that environment, some spectacularly evil things came to be accepted as "reasonable".
The science historian and author, Naomi Oreskes has argued that the hyper-individualistic attitude of the 70s-80s was a result of the cold war. The US was so anti-communist that anything that smelled of communism/socialism was denounced.
That's kind of what happened to Ayn Rand. She and her family suffered quite a lot from the Communist Revolution. I think she probably had a form of PTSD or similar. The mythology she came up with is so obviously opposite-to-communism-in-every-way (even when it makes no sense).
Like someone who almost drowned in the ocean, and then thinks showers are evil.
Extended, strictly lockdowns do not work as you paralyzing the economy. It's easy to WFH in tech earning a big paycheck to call for lockdowns when you're not impacted by them.
Florida and Texas did not have extended lockdowns, and their numbers are not worse that the states that did, and in many cases better.
Also, Texas cases went down 3 weeks after mask mandate was lifted. Watch Bill Maher - New Rules from last Friday.
I don't think that tracks. Australia, New Zealand, and several countries in east Asia enacted strict lockdown measures and their populations fared better than the US's by basically every metric except a nebulous notion of having the "freedom" to spread an infectious disease. And - this should be obvious but you never know - a massive, uncontrolled pandemic also paralyzes the economy.
As for Texas and Florida, I'd love to see some more details on how you're comparing them to other states. It seems like there are a lot of variables you would need to control for (population age and lifestyle, existing healthcare infrastructure, voluntary compliance with guidelines exclusive of legal requirement, etc.). But suffice to say, Florida is in pretty bad shape right now relative to the rest of the U.S., so I'm not sure it makes a good example for your argument.
Florida did better than 17 countries per deaths, but of course it's only a state. Not much to brag about. None of us here really believe any official state data either. A lot of people come to Florida, stay for a while, and then leave before they get sick, so it is hard to know how bad it was/is.
My area had effective mayors who enforced policies, checked businesses, and spent a lot of energy in keeping people safer, and we did much better than many parts of the state where no one cared. Mask use everywhere I go is high which I think is the biggest measure of what works. There are parts of Florida where no one wears a mask or cares to do anything. I always wanted to see per capita cases/deaths per zip code or even voting district, but no one does that.
> “This comparison isn’t an accident. [COVID deniers] are stacking the deck by choosing outliers that favor their argument,” she said.
> The data bears this out.
> North Dakota and South Dakota are both among the least restrictive states in the country with the higher per capita case rates of COVID-19 in the country.
> North Dakota has had 13,036 cases per 100,000 residents while South Dakota has had 12,585 per 100,000, according to data tracking from the New York Times.
> Vermont and Hawaii, on the other hand, have some of the lowest per capita case rates in the country (2,341 and 1,912 per 100,000, respectively) and among the most restrictive policies, according to data analysis from WalletHub.
> This doesn’t necessarily prove that more restrictions are better than fewer, either — and that’s just the point.
[…]
> “Even the very restrictive states weren’t all that restrictive when you compare to places like Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand,” Robinson said. “Without good quarantines, income supports, worker rights, a lot of what was done in a state like California was nibbling around the edges — closed schools and churches but open restaurants and bars.”
Why is this hard to predict? All pandemics begin with a case of one. Just one infected person. If your number is not zero, then it can take off again. There's no stopping it until the virus burns out by infecting everyone and their's herd immunity or vaccinations. You can suppress it with non medical methods such as very strict lockdowns, massive testing, quarantines, mask, social distancing, etc. But it's like an ember, can turn into a fire at any time and burn everything down. Unfortunately, countries do well to suppress it, then relax as if they have conquered it.
Here in Finland there was no super-strict anything and we did well.
I think it's more about how well people follow restrictions than how strict the policy is.
Even when authorities get some responses wrong, but people follow them, it helps because you can correct them. If you have cynical attitude, that government was wrong on this detail, so everything is now bullshit, nothing will work.
> I think it's more about how well people follow restrictions than how strict the policy is.
I keep hearing this but is there any hard data or studies to back it up? The numbers I've seen comparing e.g. Google Mobility data to case transmission rates haven't shown much correlation at all, let alone causation.
Territories with low populations tend to be at one of the two extremes. Reminds me of how Vatican has always had the lowest murder rate in the world (0 per 100k population), except in 1998 when it became the murder capital of the world (256 per 100k population).
Or all the 90s studies about how small (k-12) schools were so much more effective than large ones, and it turned out to just be an artifact of the data. Smaller schools had much more dispersion in outcomes, just as you’d expect. So they had both the best and worst outcomes.
The problem is that people think a punishing lockdown is going to be more effective, but it's like any highly technical task: working hard at something is only effective if you are doing the right kind of effort.
We (in the West) are big on theater: we've closed public parks, we wear masks outside, and we loooove sanitizing surfaces. Those things are expensive, distracting, and totally ineffective.
South Korea and Vietnam don't have super strict lockdowns or quarantines. Instead, they wear masks indoors and have effective contact tracing.
FYI, reverse contact tracing is even more effective, because most people aren't highly contagious, which means new cases likely came from a relatively rare super-contagious case. Step backwards to find that person, then contact trace them. Like fire against a grass-type, it's super effective.
> South Korea and Vietnam don't have super strict lockdowns or quarantines. Instead, they wear masks indoors and have effective contact tracing.
> reverse contact tracing is even more effective
Yes, but in some cultures that type of measures is seen as running against the idea of "freedom", however they choose to define it. This is the root cause. It's a cultural thing, a set of shared ideas.
Turns out, when you're dealing with a nanoscale replicator that only operates on statistics, individuals and their "freedom" are irrelevant. What really matters is how the collective strategy is shaped.
Complacency. As a German it pains to see me how we went weeks with knowing that the numbers won't get better but not doing anything against it (the same in November or whenever the last time was). There was no strategy behind it (expect maybe the hope that the way-too-slow vaccination program would somehow keep it at bay). There's one thing for sure though: If we still would be fighting the same string as last year then Germany would have very very good numbers. But we are not, we are fighting especially against the Kent variant (with now i think over 90% of cases in Germany accounting for it).
Dealing with a contagious disease is not rocket science. But in China you get sent to prison for breaking curfew while in the Netherlands you get a €95 fine.
>Seems the only countries that keep doing well are the ones with super strict lockdowns and quarantine.
Well, with effective measures to control the virus. Places like Taiwan never really locked down - that's more an emergency measure to use after things have run out of control.
If there's still someone who touts the "but X people die of the flu/car crashes/whatever per year", let this be a lesson of non-linear scaling and why you need to take this property very seriously with contagious & lethal disease.
How do you make choices on things if you do not have a comparison.
I have friends in India that are losing their jobs and are becoming hopeless for their future. What impact long term psychologically can we assign a cost to this?
Are we okay with telling people: you lucky ones who can quarantine, hunker down. You lot who are the undesirables, fetch my water in the world amongst the other masses.
There needs to be an operations research department that has the gimp from that John Travolta movie that comes out and says: “here is our cold hearted calculation. For Covid, everyone needs to get healthy, survival rates for under 30 BMI are pretty much perfect, over that, we will see 87% of fatalities amongst this group.” Instead, of getting this sort of information, we got: “everyone can get sick, equally!” We knew early on the mortality was higher for older folks, did this delineation happen, nope.
Instead of isolating the elderly, Cuomo sent infected back into the old folks homes! Then lied / hid the data of deaths.
> How do you make choices on things if you do not have a comparison
Point is that it is NOT good to compare COVID and non-scaling death factors.
But I do agree it is a more difficult overall problem than this - think the main failure is the rigid-as-steel top-down governance models that takes ages to react to even major environmental changes and make borderline idiotic decisions when being too far removed from their effects.
B1617 strain emerging from India is a cocktail of worst parts of the strains originated from UK, SA and Bra. The strain is known to be more contagious and deadlier.
It’s been quite shocking to see the numbers climb here in India. A year ago, we had an ill planned and devastating lockdown across the country. Like the article briefly mentions, the economy tanked and worse, millions of migrant workers were left without jobs and without a way to get back to their homes (and be with their families if they were anyway going to be jobless and starve).
Now the Prime Minister and the Home Minister have mostly left it to the states to deal with this.
When numbers (to the extent that they could be relied on) started going down around August or September last year, a lot of complacency set in. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Home Minister Amit Shah (along with many others in the ruling parties) declared victory. Many politicians themselves have been irresponsible and got infected by participating in large gatherings (following the adage, “do as I say, not as I do”).
The PM even boasted early this year in an international economic summit about how India had shown the way to the world in handling COVID-19 — what way, I have no idea.
The beliefs that Indians were generally immune to SARS-CoV-2 and that a country with more than two thirds of the population being quite young didn’t have much to worry about were quite strong.
There have been unsubstantiated beliefs in technology as something that can single handedly beat this. Last year, the central government and its bureaucracy decided that app based contact tracing would defeat this and released apps (announced as open source but with late and outdated releases of the source code)...this in a country where smartphone usage is minuscule and having GPS and background location tracking on 24x7 for it to collect and save data on servers without good privacy policies was necessary. That app became a gatekeeper to get into places that wanted to see your status (which was just a set of questions to answer) as green. Now that vaccines are available, the same push for using the flawed biometric resident number (called Aadhaar) to track and even decide whether to provide vaccines has been slowing things down a lot. Officially, Aadhaar is one of several identity documents accepted for vaccination. But practically, providing any other government identity document means having to argue with data entry operators (who have been instructed to insist on Aadhaar) or waiting to speak to senior officials to escalate matters. Recently, they have been making it mandatory to authenticate with some sort of biometrics when the Aadhaar number is given (one of the aims of this is to capture more/better photos and use for facial recognition).
With a massive population of nearly 1.4 billion, I don’t understand how all these barriers are going to help (note that there is also an uninformed unique health ID being created for people on the back of the vaccination efforts). Vested interests and those who have only one technology solution for every problem seem to be running the show.
Late last year, India got truly lucky with this pandemic. One can only hope that we get lucky once again, with how things have been handled by the governments.
Modi is only protecting the interests of Ambani/Adani; For the poor/patients/students/farmers/volunteers it's sedition/media manipulation with the help of bigots in the Supreme Court;
> For example, apartment buildings where people test positive for the coronavirus have been sealed off, with no one allowed to enter or exit. Police patrol their perimeter. In India's two biggest cities, Mumbai and Delhi, local lockdowns are already in place. Only essential travel is allowed, with a permit. Everyone except for front-line workers have been told to work from home. Residents aren't allowed to go for a stroll or jog, or they'll be fined.
It seems that Modi previously had announced a charitable policy of exporting half of India's vaccine doses to other countries that need it. One article (https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/indias-vaccine-com...) notes that over 60 million doses have been exported, and 52 million were administered to Indians. Another article (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/jugglebandhi/vexin...) notes that India even donated vaccines at no charge to some countries. I'm sure Modi is facing immense pressure to focus on Indians first, and some articles note that they've temporarily paused exports, but their export approach hardly seems like it deserves blame as much as applause.
India is the world's largest vaccine producer, and while they pursue a charitable strategy, they're themselves facing export constraints from countries like the US. India's Serum Institute (world's largest vaccine manufacturer) has asked Joe Biden to relax export constraints for vaccine components (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-global-trade-india-coro...). While many are using this moment to find a way to critique India's handling of the virus, it makes me feel bad as an American to see others attempt to be generous leaders for the world while we do the opposite. I don't think anyone is "evil" for putting their nation first - but putting COVID to rest requires we eradicate it worldwide.
reply