This should not be a mystery at all. India locked down entire country (no state rights in Epidemics laws), despite federal structure. Very few things can be bought, even Amazon is only delivering "essentials."
But more importantly, India has been contact tracing like a greedy algorithm on steroids since case #1. There was a positive case in a condo nearby mine. The entire condominium building and adjacent locality is sealed. Not a lockdown, sealed. Nobody in, nobody out. The authorities spent over 9 hours interviewing all family members, neighbors, and friends of the infected for contact tracing. Every contact is being monitored, with police showing up randomly to make sure of no symptoms and adherence to home quarantine.
People are self policing mainly to avoid police, but they are self policing each other because nobody wants their buildings sealed. It really is working, I see people unwilling to hand over their credit cards in shops insisting to tap to avoid infections. In my state, there are only 85 active infections, only 2 are residents of my city, and even then I'm given gloves and sanitizer when I enter minimarts, with only 10 minute allowance to go and shop with maximum 4 shoppers allowed inside.
Edit: It becomes a big news when a positive case is found nearby. There is a distributed effort of volunteers to monitor infections (http://covid19india.org). There is no way government can lie about numbers.
Absolutely this: nobody wants their buildings sealed. In most apartments, people have continued to pay full salaries to their domestic help and insist that they do not show up for work. In some cases where the domestic help are young migrants from other states, the employer families have even invited them to stay over until the lockdown is over. They continue with their daily chores with full payment and the additional benefits of being taken care of by a family instead of being on their own. Whenever someone requests the HOA to allow outside workers, other residents immediately express concern about what happens if even a single person is tested positive. Nobody wants to spend a fortnight confined to their houses, and not allowed to venture out of their house for even a walk.
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.
And then there are city level containment zones for tiny colonies (say 3-4 km^2 Radius) when even a single case is detected, where nothing is allowed, groceries are delivered by authorities.
Then there are sub - total city wide lockdowns in certain states where absolutely no travel is allowed.
Lockdown limits can be increased by the states, but limits imposed by the center can't be diluted.
Overall, the reason is very clear as the parent says - Most extreme lockdown of any country (or) at-least compared to other countries where death rates are high; subsequently the cost being paid is extraordinarily high[1].
What is the official end game? Are they hoping that it will be eliminated worldwide, will they continue in this mode indefinitely assuming it won't be, or do they plan to basically close the borders forever (i.e. anyone who enters has to be strictly quarantined so that the internal contact tracing regime could be relaxed)?
I'm in Austin. There was a confirmed case in my building and the best we got was a vague email from the management saying that someone had it and that the person had used the mailroom the Saturday before (we got the email on a Wednesday).
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.
Absolutely this. My hometown, whole hometown, home to 55k people, got sealed on just one single case. National highway is blocked. All previous passes invalidated. New passes were issued to ensure delivery of groceries. In a town where no company does grocery delivery, local vendors have started doing home delivery.
Really though the governments planning has been very opaque. Even now they don't seem to give any clue on what is going to happen once the declared lockdowns end.
Also government is keen on pushing a shady app for monitoring purposes, I home some one does a security audit of that app.
And the police has been acting in heavy handed manner. Instead of seeing this is a health care issue, the government seems to view this as some kind of law and order issue, and turned the whole country into a police state, putting countless people into misery, especially migrant labourers with hardly any concrete scheme put in to take care of them during this.
There has been serious lack of empathy and care towards the citizens from the government. Government seems to act to preserved face and reputation, rather than for the peoples welfare. Testing rates has been low, also testing is slow, it seems to take 2 or 3 days for people to get their test results. Projections, analyses etc has been hardly published by the government. Also many people have been testing positive more that 30 days, after they have arrived from out of country, that is still yet to be explained by the government.
Unfortunately, from what I have heard from my doctor friends, the government does lie about the numbers. Not all the state govts are doing this to the same extent but I have heard first hand information for doctors on the ground that the govt is hiding and misreporting numbers.
Lol where does the 5% of yearly deaths from TB factor into all this? You mean the millions dead in India over the past decade is still happening, but they stopped this brand new considerably less deadly virus right away?
I can give some ground level information. I live in a very densely populated street (total length is just two hundred meters, my guess is at least a thousand people live here). No one is dying here without others noticing. Further, there's a great amount of scrutiny into whether anyone's sick (see the reports of doctors getting beaten up even by the cops).
As far as I know, no one has died in this street in a month. The ambulance hasn't entered the street either. So unless there's a great conspiracy which most of us in the street are unaware, there really doesn't seem to be that many deaths. In fact the death rate is lower than normal, when people normally die, the first ritual is the blowing of a very loud horn in front of their house for an entire day. Haven't heard that in weeks. I live in the middle of the fifth biggest city in the country as well. It's likely many people in the street already have this but it's very unlikely that many or any have died from covid.
For reference, official disease tally for my city is now 570 cases.
I’m a (foreign) American citizen staying in India and happened to arrive here a few days before lockdown started. I don’t understand how this is a mystery: India quickly locked down the entire country and going outdoors was consistently punishable by police hitting people with sticks (thankfully it seems like the brutality has eased up since the start and police are doing things like making people write sorry on the beach or do squats instead) People are taking the virus and situation seriously, without an unusual spike in fake news. You can’t even order anything outside a narrowly defined “essentials” category online. Thankfully food delivery is opened up.
To all the Indians here who are in the same situation, phew, I understand your pain. Hopefully this next extension is the last one and then it’ll be more limited to hotspots: and we will all be able to order from amazon again soon. I also hope the economy can open quickly and smoothly when the time comes.
Ah yet another cant-be-true-they're-hiding-something article? Surely they can't be doing better than developed countries?
FWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indians watched UK and US struggle through a denial and late response in disbelief, like watching a car crash in slow motion.
This is something that has really struck me during the Corona crisis: the misplaced Western believe of superiority towards Asian countries. I am European and I feel embarrassed about how much arrogance is displayed by some people and governments.
It started already in the beginning, when the virus was spreading rapidly in China. Reports about the failing Chinese authority were all over the place, but nobody seemed to worry that when the virus would eventually reach Europe, we would be in trouble as well. After all how could we, with our superior health system and our governments that would react quickly and rationally on such a trivial threat as this.
When the virus had reached Europe, it had already reached South Korea and Taiwan as well. These countries had learned from the earlier SARS outbreak how to deal with it and thoroughly tested everyone that could possibly have the virus, symptoms or not. The reaction I saw in the media was mostly about the breach in privacy that these measures brought. Surely this was not something that we, as enlightened Western societies, would want. And anyway, what were we frightened of. This virus could never spread so fast in Europe as it did in China, because .. Well because of what actually.
Now that the pandemic has wrecked havoc in the entire Western world and most people are realising that a strategy of first constraining the virus (like in Wuhan) and then testing everybody to contain in (like in South Korea) is the only realistic way to deal with it, one might think that a bit of humbleness towards Asia would be in place.
Think again. What we're seeing more and more instead is denial. Investigations are started if the Covid virus was manifactured in a laboratory in Wuhan for instance.
I flew from India to the US in early February (2nd week).
Indian airports were doing thermal checks on passengers (using tech that had been installed during the Zika virus scare a few years back, I believe). The newspapers also had info about how anyone found with elevated temperatures were being asked to self quarantine, and the police was also following up.
The US had, absolutely nothing. Nada. Before the flight I was afraid that entering the US would be difficult, but it was clear (and it remained this way for over a month), that if anything, entering India, if not difficult, would actually involve checks, something that was non existent in US ports.
Further, and I don’t know if this is mentioned, the flight into India involved the cabin crew spraying some sort of pest control spray in the cabins before we landed. They mentioned it was due to regulations. Considering SARS-COV-2 has been found to have been easily killed (within minutes) of exposure to common disinfectants, could this spray have greatly minimized the virus entering the country, on baggage’s and clothing, etc?
The entire gist of the article isn't "it can't be true they're hiding something", it's "if statistics in the West are underreported which they likely are, why on earth would one believe they're not underreported in a country with far more limited access to medical care for much of the population where deaths from respiratory diseases are far more commonplace in normal times"
India's lockdown started the day after the UK, and whilst undoubtedly the government has taken some strong measures to make the lockdown viable, it also faced unique challenges like significant parts of the urban poor population attempting to return home to families in their villages. Of course, despite being later than Western lockdowns chronologically, India's lockdown was earlier with respect to the known spread of the disease, but that in itself is a phenomena worthy of explanation.
I agree with you. The condescending tone by Western media towards India is awful and disgusting.
The reality is probably that it's a combination of doing the lockdown well and the disease being far less deadly than initially thought due to very high asymptomatic infection rates. The latter is an emerging fact that the media here are in denial over. Therefore, they think India must be undercounting or something else. Awful and insulting.
BTW, in regards to US, the lockdowns here worked. NYC was the only place in the entire country that ended up getting hit bad. The rest of the nation has not been hit anywhere approaching what was predicted by models which took into account lockdowns. Outside of NYC, US statistics match Germany.
I live in Kazakhstan and so far out country seems to be doing a right thing. We're heavily quarantined and I don't think that states are hiding anything. Economy implications of such a lockdown probably will be harsh, but that's a different thing. There was ill person in the building I'm living in and now entire building section just closed, nobody can go out and regular desinfections are performed (I don't think that they make any sense, but whatever).
So I'm absolutely sure that Kazakhstan is doing better than many European countries and for sure better than US. May be our government is not the most democratic one out there, but they care about citizens and their tight grip over country allows them to make an unpopular but effective decisions.
Some western people just think that they are strictly superior everywhere to the developing countries. That might be true in a lot of areas, but it's not an universal truth.
Came here to say this. When compared to the Western world, India did fare well and its not a mystery. Though the lock-downs were brutal for many Indians, they were strictly implemented and most people had the sense to follow the procedures. No denying that economic repercussions will be brutal as well but not many lives were lost. In my hometown, there isn't a single active case of COVID19 and its essentially a "green zone" now with most things returning back to normal. Local Police did a phenomenal job contact tracing and enforcing the lock-down. I wonder if life in USA would have gone back to normal by now if there was a better response and acceptance of the impending crisis. I am glad they don't have Fox news in India.
It seems countries are learning something from the those affected earlier which is good. But there are a huge number of under counts to be seen in the all-cause mortality data.
I have my fingers crossed for everyone going through this, but only after the fact are we going to get a good idea of what happened (and that goes for Western countries too).
It's not just COVID-19 deaths, raw death numbers (as measured by death certificates, you cannot cremate/bury people without one) are down as well -- this report has some evidence, including lower business in at crematoriums[1]. This is likely due to the very stringent lockdown in India, and the somewhat underrated fact that traffic collisions and accidents kill huge numbers of people every day in India.
That said, while lower death rates (India's seem to be about half of the world's death rate) are to be celebrated, there are confounding factors.
1) The reported death count are mostly hospital deaths only. Home deaths aren't counted.
2) As the article notes, mis-diagnosing is a problem especially outside hospitals.
But if there's something that genuinely is reducing the death rate, then that's obviously a huge opportunity to study and learn from.
It is mainly with a sense of relief (rather than disbelief) that I watch the progression of numbers daily. The lockdown was early and quite stringent and has definitely made a difference. The most stringent lockdown has little chance of being executed effectively in India and there are innumerable cases of people cheerfully ignoring or doing so in desperation. Regardless, the awareness of COVID-19 is extremely high, probably more than any other single critical disease that afflicts us. This should have made a significant difference in influencing the behaviour of the majority. Tests are for the most part only for the symptomatic or with known contact, if asymptomatic. Almost certainly infection cases will be much, much higher. But fatalities are tough to ignore. In today's environment even a death unrelated to COVID causes consternation amongst neighbours and gets known widely. I take that to mean that the fatalities are probably close enough to reality. And that's unbelievably good and I can only hope that it doesn't get bad in the near future.
The article while making some valid points is full of insinuations. This is disingenuous.
The main reason for the low death rates is the lock-down/quarantine in place. India did this very quickly and very comprehensively. I would never have believed that such a lock-down would be followed and enforced in India if i were not living through it. It would be interesting to see how quickly the slope changes once the lock-down is lifted.
Other maybe contributing factors are; Sunlight & UV exposure, High Humidity, a healthy younger population, a better immune system (hygiene hypothesis) etc.
Simply said, the "Developed Western Nations" dropped the ball on recognizing the threat and putting in counter-measures and are now paying the price.
Minor nitpick on reporting : literally every person they quoted with Indian sounding names live and work outside of India. And the lone Indian source they quoted, Prof Reddy, was the only one who lived in India and he was the only one who was not skeptical of the numbers. Not one expert from India was used in the article,besides Prof. Reddy, which is a relatively open society.
I generally have a very poor opinion of the govt officials in my country owing to some very bad past experiences in India. But this time I too was pleasantly surprised.
My friend lives in a very populated area in Delhi called Tilak nagar and he told me in feb end iirc that the house opposite his has a huge plaque on it that says *Quarantine, this house has a covid patient" put on by police. This was the time when nobody knew how serious this thing was. So yeah it does seem they got some things right too this time.
In the state of India that I live in, at least three people have died in the hospital of very Covid-19-like symptoms, but they were not counted as Covid-19 deaths.
Two of double pneumonia, both with travel history, but their tests came up negative. They were both healthy until very recently. One had arrived from the US, where the chances of community-acquiring-pneumonia are low as I gather.
One of cardiac arrest, but AFAIK she wasn't tested because she had no travel history.
I am not seeing the theory of Vitamin D deficiency being highly correlated with severe outcomes from Covid-19 infections being suggested in the article. Please see links below for this theory:
BBC is a known for its India bashing. This article has no depth and is conjuring up some kind of conspiracy theory. HN quality is going down the drain.
The BBC is known to write about ex-colonies with a certain level of contempt.
There is a thinly veiled nostalgia about British superiority and to an extent still consider the subcontinent to be some sort of 'unfinished work' that still requires 'civilizing'.
I have noticed a similar sentiment among French and Belgian people about their colonies, but I haven't read enough of their media or politics to know how pervasive it is.
Unfortunately UK government and Boris Johnson failed to take the pandemic seriously. This include BBC too. While the world was watching the kingdom with fear and awe, the establishment had a wandering attention.
Agreed re. Boris (but not about the BBC). Boris made easy decisions, not the right ones. He is expedient rather than well-judging, and he was too willing to treat politics as a game of 2 sides rather than trying to unify. Maybe he can learn from this.
Unlike what this article tries to subtly hint, there is no massive conspiracy theory stuff going on here. There are too many people in India (with smartphones and cameras and 3G/4G internet) to pull off anything covert. No one here views this as mystery but as a result of country's discipline in lockdown till now.
The country imposed an early screening and tight lockdown and people followed it well till now.
India is doing the lockdown well. Apartment buildings apparently have taken it on themselves to not allow anyone in and out of the buildings. They let one vendor each for groceries, milk, vegetables, pharmacy etc and that's it. People are not allowed to go out or even play in the yard. And this is not government mandated, the HOA equivalent for apartment buildings are doing it themselves.
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?
Germany tested more heavily than neighbors earlier on, so probably discovered a higher proportion of "mild" cases. Also, Germany does have a superior healthcare infrastructure in some ways compared to the other big EU countries: in 2012, it had about 2.5 times as many ICU beds per capita as Italy, France and Spain, and 4.5 times that of the UK [1], along with more hospital beds overall [2]. The US had somewhat more ICU beds per capita than Germany, but only about a third of the hospital beds in general, so ICU beds are certainly not the only explanation for why it hasn't been quite as bad here.
As important as healthcare infrastructure is, it's worthless to someone without financial access to it, either directly due to lacking insurance or indirectly due to fear of losing one's job due to absence. Extremely few people (but not zero) in Germany would be hesitant to seek treatment for Covid-19 due to either of those worries, compared with a large (and due to the unemployment situation, growing) portion of people in the US. Americans are being told that they won't get surprise bills for Covid-10 treatment, but I imagine more than a few have wondered how a visit to the emergency room would affect their finances if they turned out not to have it, and decided to tough it out a bit too long.
So, if available healthcare infrastructure and individual financial access to that infrastructure are taken together, Germany looks to be ahead of both the other large EU countries and the US, all of which have suffered more deaths per capita these past few awful weeks.
If some of the German states try to get "back to normal" too fast, though, this relatively good situation could change...
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.
Poor article, not even a single mention of the most likely reason for low death rate (apart from young population), the weather!
Strong Sun (UV light) and high humidity quickly kills the virus. Warm countries like Thailand - despite millions of tourists from Wuhan - have low death rates. In Spain cold Madrid was affected much worse than sunnier south. Summer will soon rapidly kill of the virus in southern Europe.
Hey, guys I'm from India. There is a very strict lock down here. It has been there for a long time now. My city (Bangalore) did the lockdown a bit early. Like one more comment down this thread, there will be really loud horns in front of houses. That has not been going on around here.
[+] [-] arihant|6 years ago|reply
But more importantly, India has been contact tracing like a greedy algorithm on steroids since case #1. There was a positive case in a condo nearby mine. The entire condominium building and adjacent locality is sealed. Not a lockdown, sealed. Nobody in, nobody out. The authorities spent over 9 hours interviewing all family members, neighbors, and friends of the infected for contact tracing. Every contact is being monitored, with police showing up randomly to make sure of no symptoms and adherence to home quarantine.
People are self policing mainly to avoid police, but they are self policing each other because nobody wants their buildings sealed. It really is working, I see people unwilling to hand over their credit cards in shops insisting to tap to avoid infections. In my state, there are only 85 active infections, only 2 are residents of my city, and even then I'm given gloves and sanitizer when I enter minimarts, with only 10 minute allowance to go and shop with maximum 4 shoppers allowed inside.
Edit: It becomes a big news when a positive case is found nearby. There is a distributed effort of volunteers to monitor infections (http://covid19india.org). There is no way government can lie about numbers.
[+] [-] sameerds|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharadov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|6 years ago|reply
Then there are sub - total city wide lockdowns in certain states where absolutely no travel is allowed.
Lockdown limits can be increased by the states, but limits imposed by the center can't be diluted.
Overall, the reason is very clear as the parent says - Most extreme lockdown of any country (or) at-least compared to other countries where death rates are high; subsequently the cost being paid is extraordinarily high[1].
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22676312
[+] [-] sershe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoisjuan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yumraj|6 years ago|reply
So looks like India is doing in practice what they show CDC doing in the US in the movies, such as in Outbreak.
[+] [-] wasdfff|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] enitihas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
How does this work with essentials like food and medical care? Does the government bring supplies to people since they can't go to the store?
[+] [-] billfruit|6 years ago|reply
Also government is keen on pushing a shady app for monitoring purposes, I home some one does a security audit of that app.
And the police has been acting in heavy handed manner. Instead of seeing this is a health care issue, the government seems to view this as some kind of law and order issue, and turned the whole country into a police state, putting countless people into misery, especially migrant labourers with hardly any concrete scheme put in to take care of them during this.
There has been serious lack of empathy and care towards the citizens from the government. Government seems to act to preserved face and reputation, rather than for the peoples welfare. Testing rates has been low, also testing is slow, it seems to take 2 or 3 days for people to get their test results. Projections, analyses etc has been hardly published by the government. Also many people have been testing positive more that 30 days, after they have arrived from out of country, that is still yet to be explained by the government.
[+] [-] pkphilip|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mesaframe|6 years ago|reply
Care to provide source?
>People are self policing mainly to avoid police, but they are self policing each other because nobody wants their buildings sealed.
I have seen videos of people violating lockdown without fear.
>There are only 85 active infections
85 infections which were caught.
[+] [-] whb07|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webbrahmin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|6 years ago|reply
How is what you're describing a greedy algorithm? The behavior is based on self-interest, but that's not what a greedy algorithm is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
[+] [-] ramraj07|6 years ago|reply
As far as I know, no one has died in this street in a month. The ambulance hasn't entered the street either. So unless there's a great conspiracy which most of us in the street are unaware, there really doesn't seem to be that many deaths. In fact the death rate is lower than normal, when people normally die, the first ritual is the blowing of a very loud horn in front of their house for an entire day. Haven't heard that in weeks. I live in the middle of the fifth biggest city in the country as well. It's likely many people in the street already have this but it's very unlikely that many or any have died from covid.
For reference, official disease tally for my city is now 570 cases.
[+] [-] kylehotchkiss|6 years ago|reply
To all the Indians here who are in the same situation, phew, I understand your pain. Hopefully this next extension is the last one and then it’ll be more limited to hotspots: and we will all be able to order from amazon again soon. I also hope the economy can open quickly and smoothly when the time comes.
[+] [-] i_have_to_speak|6 years ago|reply
FWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indians watched UK and US struggle through a denial and late response in disbelief, like watching a car crash in slow motion.
[+] [-] misja111|6 years ago|reply
It started already in the beginning, when the virus was spreading rapidly in China. Reports about the failing Chinese authority were all over the place, but nobody seemed to worry that when the virus would eventually reach Europe, we would be in trouble as well. After all how could we, with our superior health system and our governments that would react quickly and rationally on such a trivial threat as this.
When the virus had reached Europe, it had already reached South Korea and Taiwan as well. These countries had learned from the earlier SARS outbreak how to deal with it and thoroughly tested everyone that could possibly have the virus, symptoms or not. The reaction I saw in the media was mostly about the breach in privacy that these measures brought. Surely this was not something that we, as enlightened Western societies, would want. And anyway, what were we frightened of. This virus could never spread so fast in Europe as it did in China, because .. Well because of what actually.
Now that the pandemic has wrecked havoc in the entire Western world and most people are realising that a strategy of first constraining the virus (like in Wuhan) and then testing everybody to contain in (like in South Korea) is the only realistic way to deal with it, one might think that a bit of humbleness towards Asia would be in place. Think again. What we're seeing more and more instead is denial. Investigations are started if the Covid virus was manifactured in a laboratory in Wuhan for instance.
[+] [-] thaway757383884|6 years ago|reply
Indian airports were doing thermal checks on passengers (using tech that had been installed during the Zika virus scare a few years back, I believe). The newspapers also had info about how anyone found with elevated temperatures were being asked to self quarantine, and the police was also following up.
The US had, absolutely nothing. Nada. Before the flight I was afraid that entering the US would be difficult, but it was clear (and it remained this way for over a month), that if anything, entering India, if not difficult, would actually involve checks, something that was non existent in US ports.
Further, and I don’t know if this is mentioned, the flight into India involved the cabin crew spraying some sort of pest control spray in the cabins before we landed. They mentioned it was due to regulations. Considering SARS-COV-2 has been found to have been easily killed (within minutes) of exposure to common disinfectants, could this spray have greatly minimized the virus entering the country, on baggage’s and clothing, etc?
[+] [-] notahacker|6 years ago|reply
India's lockdown started the day after the UK, and whilst undoubtedly the government has taken some strong measures to make the lockdown viable, it also faced unique challenges like significant parts of the urban poor population attempting to return home to families in their villages. Of course, despite being later than Western lockdowns chronologically, India's lockdown was earlier with respect to the known spread of the disease, but that in itself is a phenomena worthy of explanation.
[+] [-] JPKab|6 years ago|reply
The reality is probably that it's a combination of doing the lockdown well and the disease being far less deadly than initially thought due to very high asymptomatic infection rates. The latter is an emerging fact that the media here are in denial over. Therefore, they think India must be undercounting or something else. Awful and insulting.
BTW, in regards to US, the lockdowns here worked. NYC was the only place in the entire country that ended up getting hit bad. The rest of the nation has not been hit anywhere approaching what was predicted by models which took into account lockdowns. Outside of NYC, US statistics match Germany.
[+] [-] vbezhenar|6 years ago|reply
So I'm absolutely sure that Kazakhstan is doing better than many European countries and for sure better than US. May be our government is not the most democratic one out there, but they care about citizens and their tight grip over country allows them to make an unpopular but effective decisions.
Some western people just think that they are strictly superior everywhere to the developing countries. That might be true in a lot of areas, but it's not an universal truth.
[+] [-] Bhilai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrmm|6 years ago|reply
I have my fingers crossed for everyone going through this, but only after the fact are we going to get a good idea of what happened (and that goes for Western countries too).
[+] [-] pmachinery|6 years ago|reply
So many keystrokes and clicked bait on something nobody has any concrete insight into.
[+] [-] carlsborg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] signal11|6 years ago|reply
That said, while lower death rates (India's seem to be about half of the world's death rate) are to be celebrated, there are confounding factors.
1) The reported death count are mostly hospital deaths only. Home deaths aren't counted.
2) As the article notes, mis-diagnosing is a problem especially outside hospitals.
But if there's something that genuinely is reducing the death rate, then that's obviously a huge opportunity to study and learn from.
[1] https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-s-lower-death-rate...
[+] [-] kumarvvr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astatine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rramadass|6 years ago|reply
The main reason for the low death rates is the lock-down/quarantine in place. India did this very quickly and very comprehensively. I would never have believed that such a lock-down would be followed and enforced in India if i were not living through it. It would be interesting to see how quickly the slope changes once the lock-down is lifted.
Other maybe contributing factors are; Sunlight & UV exposure, High Humidity, a healthy younger population, a better immune system (hygiene hypothesis) etc.
Simply said, the "Developed Western Nations" dropped the ball on recognizing the threat and putting in counter-measures and are now paying the price.
[+] [-] manishsharan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superasn|6 years ago|reply
My friend lives in a very populated area in Delhi called Tilak nagar and he told me in feb end iirc that the house opposite his has a huge plaque on it that says *Quarantine, this house has a covid patient" put on by police. This was the time when nobody knew how serious this thing was. So yeah it does seem they got some things right too this time.
[+] [-] kranner|6 years ago|reply
Two of double pneumonia, both with travel history, but their tests came up negative. They were both healthy until very recently. One had arrived from the US, where the chances of community-acquiring-pneumonia are low as I gather.
One of cardiac arrest, but AFAIK she wasn't tested because she had no travel history.
[+] [-] sdiq|6 years ago|reply
1) https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1548/rr-6
2) https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-21211/v1
3) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3585561
[+] [-] thbr99|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC
[+] [-] screye|6 years ago|reply
There is a thinly veiled nostalgia about British superiority and to an extent still consider the subcontinent to be some sort of 'unfinished work' that still requires 'civilizing'.
I have noticed a similar sentiment among French and Belgian people about their colonies, but I haven't read enough of their media or politics to know how pervasive it is.
[+] [-] diminish|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_pdp09|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muktabh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yalogin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MandieD|6 years ago|reply
As important as healthcare infrastructure is, it's worthless to someone without financial access to it, either directly due to lacking insurance or indirectly due to fear of losing one's job due to absence. Extremely few people (but not zero) in Germany would be hesitant to seek treatment for Covid-19 due to either of those worries, compared with a large (and due to the unemployment situation, growing) portion of people in the US. Americans are being told that they won't get surprise bills for Covid-10 treatment, but I imagine more than a few have wondered how a visit to the emergency room would affect their finances if they turned out not to have it, and decided to tough it out a bit too long.
So, if available healthcare infrastructure and individual financial access to that infrastructure are taken together, Germany looks to be ahead of both the other large EU countries and the US, all of which have suffered more deaths per capita these past few awful weeks.
If some of the German states try to get "back to normal" too fast, though, this relatively good situation could change...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-co...
[2] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2017-62-en...
[+] [-] rovolo|6 years ago|reply
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
[+] [-] jatsek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garyclarke27|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rataata_jr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YetAnotherNick|6 years ago|reply