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.
No there's no such study. There has been a lot of focus on election rallies and Kumbh Mela in press, but it seems to be mostly due to people turning the tragedy of the second wave into a political opportunity to attack Modi. But Kumbh Mela is one event, and elections are only taking place in a few states. The reality is that India was handling the pandemic quite well through a policy of highly localized containment, and general mobility among the populace was increasing in response to improved pandemic conditions and the trickling of vaccines (although India gave away tens of millions of vaccine doses to other nations and hurt its own drive as a result of that generosity). I suspect that the reality of this wave is that many factors contributed - increased general mobility, some large events, and likely new variants that aren't well understood yet and may spread more easily. Prior to that, everything and everyone being blamed right now is just speculative and opportunist.
The cases spiked after April. If it was not mutation the total number of active cases would have still going up from last October. Active cases suddenly dropped from October with no good factors to indicate why it dropped.
I have been to 3 wedding after the drop. Almost no one was wearing mask. As far i know govt was still asking people to wear mask. There were major Hindu festivals after October and coming winter were everyone was worried the cases would rise. Did the virus simply hide and rose rapidly?
While the article is correct in pointing out the government's complacency over Covid-19, I'm not sure whether mass gatherings were the reason for the second wave.
Of course, mass gatherings in such a period are stupid and will only lead to a huge amount of cases and deaths, but India had already crossed 100,000 cases a day well before the Kumbh, driven by 70,000 cases a day in the state of Maharashtra, where there were no political rallies and the state has nothing to do with the Kumbh.
I'd be happy to understand why this is so from someone with a deeper understanding of the situation.
Hence the credulous articles about how India was 'special' when the virus first started spreading there because there were so few fatalities. Turns out it was spreading incredibly fast so cases were surging, but it took a month or more for the wave of deaths to follow. But follow it absolutely did.
Clips from my friend in Goa show the street scene hasn't changed. People still loitering and buying things in the open air and forming dense crowds. From the clip maybe less than half had masks. Super disappointing and concerning.
These numbers seem far to low given the flippant nature most city dwellers are appearing to have to this disease and taking necessary precautions. To me, this is the calm before the storm.
Your own BBC link only talks about cases increasing only in a few states at that time. It quoted medical authorities saying the increased number of cases in some states could be due to increased testing. It includes a graph showing that the overall case rate and death rate in India wasn’t out of the ordinary, matching short lived fluctuations previously seen. This same article also doesn’t single out political rallies or reopening as you did - it speculated about those possibilities for some localities, and also speculated that it could be due to new variants, but doesn’t decisively point at anything as a “key factor” driving a new countrywide surge. The virologist quoted there also clearly didn’t think a big new countrywide surge had begun, given his very tempered statement:
> "We may see more localised surges in different part of the country in the coming weeks, and the only way to stay on top of the situation is to be vigilant. We need to be concerned but we are not at a stage where we need to panic"
Something I haven't found is detailed breakdowns of who is actually being infected this time around.
India did have very strict lockdowns. Yet, very high rates of antibodies were also measured in some areas. Those strict lockdowns may have been successful in shielding some of the population from covid, and that part of the population is getting infected now. India is a very unequal society, with a very wide range of wealth present in the same areas.
In the US in some lockdown states there have been dramatic differences between infection rates between different socioeconomic levels. While in other states that were more open, that has tended to be less true.
I also observed this - the slow rise from end-Feb to end-Mar and then the sudden very very steep rise in covid positive cases from end-Mar.
In India, people started opening up during Sep/Oct 2020. I too relaxed the strict restrictions/rules that I was, till then, sticking to. Went to restaurants with friends and teammates (with masks wherever possible) and many people were doing inter-state travels, political events started happening, many festivals/gatherings started happening etc. Life was returning to normal. My important observation is that from then (Sep/Oct 2020) onwards, lots and lots of people were not following covid protocols properly. Social distancing was not followed. Many people did not even put on masks. Am not sure why, but even with all these behaviours which should result in increasing covid positive numbers, the covid positive numbers were continuously going down. I think it hit bottom during second half of Feb 2021.
And then the numbers started to rise - slowly from end-Feb to end-Mar and then suddenly very very steeply rise from end-Mar 2021. And by mid-Apr 2021, things got very alarming. Most of my circle of friends knew that generally the second wave will hit harder than the first. But we also that because vaccination has been going on for 2 or 2.5 months by then, it can help. The strictest (to follow the restrictions) among my friends also started to loosen up a bit. The previous reports that the second wave will hit us during Jan/Feb did not come true. So, we were hoping that there won't be a second wave. Even the US thought that they can start banning the export of raw materials needed for the production of vaccines in India.
So, I do not know if anyone predicted (with numbers to backup their estimates) that the case load will be this bad during Apr 2021. The second wave caught lots of us by surprise. But I believe, like the US and UK survived their second waves and are doing pretty well now, India too will hopefully emerge better and stronger.
Mumbai had the peak of its 'first wave' on October 7th. See mobility trends for vehicular and pedestrian traffic at https://covid19.apple.com/mobility. You'll see both monotonically increasing as the peak approaches and then recedes. If this were a simple morality tale of the level of social contact, this wouldn't be the case.
The paper the Forbes article references doesn't seem to refute the idea that there wasn't a spike in "the participating demographic". They mostly focused on the increase in social distancing among those not participating in the protests.
That aside, the Atlantic article talks about outside air diluting the virus. The Forbes article you linked also talks about this.
I'm pretty doubtful that there was a spike. The states like Texas, Florida, California, and Arizona have just been increasing gradually all the time. And NY didn't spike, even though there were protests. The national "spike" appears to me to be a phenomenon of adding up the individual states, where the declines were overtaken by the rises.
Do you/we have any good reason to believe that outdoor gatherings are much of a problem? The impression I've gotten is that indoors is where most instances of large amounts of people getting infected at once happens.
There is definite community spread in India. They are not saying the truth either to stop panic or because they have not tested or because they are misinformed (less likely)
I am not sure why he said "no signs", because now the data available publicly proves that there is community spread.
I do not mean to create panic - but I have strong reasons to correlate that the community spread cases that turned into severe respiratory problems started appearing on March 15, 2020. Based on contact tracing, the patients very likely contracted the virus between March3-March5. This was a likely time of the initial community spread and in fact super spread via weddings.
Another timeline possibility is that the community spread started sometime in the last 5-10 days of February. It was also a time when many people were getting cough, cold and respiratory diseases because of a seasonal change. The OPDs were very busy and probably few of the patients were international travelers carrying Covid-19. In the first week of March, there were many cases where patients were seeing weird and elongated respiratory problems that normally do not occur seasonally. However, many of these cases in OPDs also reduced by the second week of March. The first lockdown address from the PM was on March 20.
A better way to confirm is to see whether there is a spike in cases (and severe cases) by March 31 - even after the lockdown
How do we reconcile this with the known spread rate and lethality? If it was spreading around late December when lot's of people are traveling, seeing family and drinking over Christmas and New Years then where are the mass casualties?
With a doubling time of 3 days and a morality rate of 1% a single person had it December 31st it would have infected a million people by around the end of February, killed approximately 10,000 and 150,000 would have been hospitalized by it.
I've seen a lot of articles about how it may have been spreading earlier but none seem to account for the exponential growth.
Exponential growth can get out of hand very quickly. It doesn't take too many people to mess up, break rules, or get unlucky for this virus to erupt.
Also, way more people are indoors in November in Sweden than August. Many people travel to remote cabins in the summer - August in Stockholm is about as deserted as San Francisco during Burning Man. They're mostly back by September, bringing more people in proximity. I'm in Seattle and Washington is locking down again, as colder temps have brought the long predicted fall spike.
At the high level, there are two reasons for the steep drop in Coronavirus in India:
1. Localized herd immunity in the cities. Link above points to results from Mumbai. Recent studies from Delhi have also shown similar numbers (>50% of population with antibodies).
2. Low testing in rural areas. It's hypothesized that a lot of the current spreading of the virus is happening silently in rural area, where testing infrastructure is underdeveloped.
It is ramping up significantly, with a corresponding growth rate of confirmed cases. 4 days ago it was approaching 1000. It will probably be 10,000 by tomorrow.
But those rallies were conducted in West Bangal and highest COVID cases are in Maharashtra. I'm definitely against these rallies but logic seems to fail us here, isn't it?
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.
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