There are some numbers which simply don't make any sense.
Take today's data:
Delhi - 3,314 cases. (likely to go up as data is updated for tonight). Total population of Delhi is 19 Million.
Rajasthan - 2,438 cases. Total population: 68.9 Million
Haryana - 311 cases. Total population: 25.4 Million
Haryana has less than 10% of Delhi's covid case numbers while being a much larger state and while sharing a big border with both Delhi and Rajasthan where the covid cases are much higher. Also, huge numbers of people travel between Haryana and Delhi on a daily basis. Haryana's numbers make no sense.
Uttar Pradesh - 2,134 cases. Total population: 204 Million
About 30% less than Delhi while being much, much larger than Delhi and sharing a huge border with Delhi with vast numbers of people travelling to and from Delhi! Uttar Pradesh numbers too seem heavily under reported.
Bihar - 403 cases. Total population: 99 Million
Bihar has much, much lower covid cases than even Uttar Pradesh when Uttar Pradesh's numbers were themselves already suspiciously low. Bihar shares a huge border with Uttar Pradesh and there is simply no way Bihar with a much poorer healthcare infrastructure can have such low covid numbers.
Both UP and Bihar has huge numbers of migrants working in Delhi, Mumbai etc which makes these numbers even more dubious.
So on the face of it, there are big issues with these numbers being put out by some of the biggest states in India. If these numbers were more accurate, the overall figures for covid cases from India will be much higher.
India shares a massive border with China and is right next to China while having almost the same number of covid cases as Peru - which is halfway across the world from China and which is relatively shielded from the rest of the world in comparison to India - in terms of number of travellers coming in etc.
The data suggests that Covid had already become so widespread in India by the time Kumbh happened that the few thousand of cases happening represented only a tiny fraction of cases in India.
Of course, after you point his out, the pièce de résistance comes out, calling the data itself fake based on no argument at all.
From my coworkers in india, I think that India's reporting has been less to do with inaccuracy and more to do with their entire healthcare system just crumbling under the pressure of covid. Far too many people getting (and dying from) covid to accurately measure and capture the true impact. It was real bad.
Each outbreak is regional, having the numbers normalised to the total country population doesn't really give interesting information. It is the medical system of that specific region that is at risk of saturation.
Raw numbers aren't useful — that's like saying "X country had the most COVID cases" without telling us the population of X country, or how its case rate compares to other countries.
> This report says that's so: The number of infections double in both countries.
Not even that. It says the number of infections is roughly equally likely to increase in both places, but they don't say anything about the magnitude of the increase.
Complete opposite. Arguably better would be to look at local population density, but even that is just a proxy for how easily the virus should spread.
Total number is much better than per-capita, because the point is to see how quickly the disease spreads, which it does from a single point. No country is even close to majority infected so weighting by the size of the arbitrary borders enclosing the outbreak is only misleading.
What useful information would it convey, when moving the US 4x farther up the line than China? Or Italy? The point is to show how quickly the virus spreads through a population, which it does with great consistency. Per capita doesn't even tell you anything about how effective the response was been, it only tells you how big the country is. Per-capita would de-normalize this data!
If you have any indication that the numbers are fabricated you're better off posting them (or any references at all). Otherwise you just sound like you're appealing to prejudices, like as if "south-east asian" countries couldn't possibly have had an effective epidemiologic response.
(It might not have - you might be right - still, the form of your argument is completely wrong for fruitful discussion)
I don't think that calling the numbers unreliable implies incompetence or even worse, malice, on the part of the reporting country. It's simply difficult as shit to come up with reliable stats on something very new in the middle of an outbreak. Think of how many people aren't even noticing that they have the virus, and thus will never be counted as infected. This is just as true in Milan or California as it is in Wuhan. All numbers are noisy and subject to substantial revision. It is, however, quite clear that this virus is not as serious as SARS or especially MERS. It can still kill millions if it infects hundreds of millions though, so that's just a comment on whether you, individually, should worry about getting it.
Ah, nothing says "credibility" like reiterating the good old burning covid-corpses of india lie, or removing India from your scary looking chart of new infections, because it would show India's steady drop in new infections.
Hopefuly Thomas gets a bit more convincing scaredata for the Lambda Variant.
That's fine, but seems to be making the same error as the article: numbers from the very beginning of the pandemic are perhaps not representative of the whole story. Particularly so when the numbers are taken from specific sub-populations.
You should really read more materials on international reporting standards before making uninformed claims like “if the China CDC is counting covid-19 cases the way they count flu cases...” These are completely different things and your “contribution” to the discussion unfortunately only adds noise to already widespread misinformation and obscures real concerns.
Edit: And to be absolutely clear, being suspicious of the accuracy of the data is one thing and I have no objection to that; saying the stats are off because “they are counting covid-19 cases the way they count flu cases” only shows you’re uninformed about the topic.
The one thing that should be obvious at this point is that developing countries are not reporting their real numbers.
China didn't report until international cases arose. Same with Iran. if you look at the map of infected countries, there are several that mysteriously are between infected countries and somehow have zero cases.
Take today's data:
Delhi - 3,314 cases. (likely to go up as data is updated for tonight). Total population of Delhi is 19 Million.
Rajasthan - 2,438 cases. Total population: 68.9 Million
Haryana - 311 cases. Total population: 25.4 Million
Haryana has less than 10% of Delhi's covid case numbers while being a much larger state and while sharing a big border with both Delhi and Rajasthan where the covid cases are much higher. Also, huge numbers of people travel between Haryana and Delhi on a daily basis. Haryana's numbers make no sense.
Uttar Pradesh - 2,134 cases. Total population: 204 Million
About 30% less than Delhi while being much, much larger than Delhi and sharing a huge border with Delhi with vast numbers of people travelling to and from Delhi! Uttar Pradesh numbers too seem heavily under reported.
Bihar - 403 cases. Total population: 99 Million
Bihar has much, much lower covid cases than even Uttar Pradesh when Uttar Pradesh's numbers were themselves already suspiciously low. Bihar shares a huge border with Uttar Pradesh and there is simply no way Bihar with a much poorer healthcare infrastructure can have such low covid numbers.
Both UP and Bihar has huge numbers of migrants working in Delhi, Mumbai etc which makes these numbers even more dubious.
So on the face of it, there are big issues with these numbers being put out by some of the biggest states in India. If these numbers were more accurate, the overall figures for covid cases from India will be much higher.
India shares a massive border with China and is right next to China while having almost the same number of covid cases as Peru - which is halfway across the world from China and which is relatively shielded from the rest of the world in comparison to India - in terms of number of travellers coming in etc.
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