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Is Covid ‘Ferocious’ in India?
You can find a million examples like this, but I’m posting it anyway.
The news:
Note the word “ferocious” in the above. “India is experiencing a ferocious new Covid-19 wave.”
Now let’s look at the data:
Yes, India had a recent rise in cases, and it was definitely a cause for concern. There is a new variant that makes it doubly a cause for concern. But look at the case rate in context, on a “per-million” basis. It didn’t get to the levels seen in the EU or US, and now seems on a downward trend. That could change, of course, but to call it “ferocious?”
India’s covid death rate was rising along with its case rate, suggesting that it wasn’t a nothing-burger. But it seems to have leveled off, well short of levels seen in the EU and US. There could be new peaks to come. So, a matter of concern, yes. But “ferocious?” Maybe that word should be saved for later, in case it comes about.
In most parts of the world, the drop in covid cases and deaths seems roughly correlated with an increase in vaccinations. But India still has only 10 percent of its population vaccinated. That is a matter of concern. One wonders what could keep the case and death rates from rising again, and quickly. But it’s a little early to be calling what we’ve had so far, “ferocious,” isn’t it?
But that’s our news media. They do what they do.
Published in Journalism
Great post.
The drops in cases seem to predate the vaccinations. For the US, the cases peaked in mid-January. Those cases were from people that got infected a week or two earlier. At that time nobody was fully vaccinated. Vaccinations might have accelerated things some, but the infection spike from the holidays looks to have rapidly advanced herd immunity to move Rt to <1.0.
Lockdowns=bad. Masks=useless. Vaccines=late.
Sunshine=good. open windows=good. treatments=good.
India Covid cases peaked ten days ago. COVID surges always peak and drop in pretty predictable-shaped curves. It is what COVID does. India still has nine times fewer total deaths per million as the USA. (200 versus 1800) Even allowing for large reporting gaps, it is unlikely to be as deadly there as it has been here despite the hype.
It drives me crazy that when COVID case numbers recede people scramble around for what policy measure must have caused the drop as if it would ever be a continuous surge if not for masks/ lockdowns/vaccines/ad hoc quarantines etc. Our beloved experts have spent 14 months (a) making absurd predictions and (b) taking credit when the absurd numbers in the predictions do not happen. COVID continues to do what COVID does in spite of every NPI.
The COVID pandemic is not over so as your governor I direct that the emergency order to only eat pizza while standing on one foot and wearing clean underwear as a hat be extended by another 30 days. We are all in this together.
A country with lots of cases and lots of vaccinations (e.g. the UK) will likely still see increases around the same times this year as last but smaller. Case numbers in Britain are declining and will probably be only a trickle this summer but they were declining towards a summertime trickle about this time last year so I am not ready to declare that the bug is gone but I am very confident that it is unlikely to break out in big numbers when flu season resumes there in the fall.
Remember in the movie Demolition Man that in the future all restaurants are Taco Bell?
This is the future. All newspapers are the National Enquirer.
What kind of underwear, sir? Shorts or briefs?
I was thinking all newspapers are Pravda.
Who benefits? Who is enemies with India? Anyone who might have a virology lab where this virus developed? Hmmnnn. . .
Now that you mention it, one of the curves on that graph actually does look predictable compared to the others. That’s the one for India. All of the case and death rates are 7-day rolling averages, so there is some smoothing going on, but the graphs of case rate and death rate for India are remarkably smooth and textbookish.
In the U.S. there is a definite weekend effect, but there are other departures from any smooth, textbookish curve.
Does India really have a smooth-running health reporting system compared to the rest of the world that would result in such nice looking data? Maybe India doesn’t do weekends? I don’t know. That could be part of it, but still, those are some smooth-running data compared to what we get from most other countries.
I should have thought of that before. I don’t completely trust Russia’s data, because there, too, the curves are suspiciously smooth.
Could it be that India is fudging its numbers? I’m not so sure that the U.S. data aren’t influenced somewhat by perverse incentives, but those India data look like more than a response to government incentives.
This is really interesting to me.
The Spanish flu really disappeared after 18 months. In other words, it ceased being a deadly pandemic. The flu vaccine was not developed until the 1930s, it was not used widely in the United States until the 1940s. The flu’s “disappearance” was not due to vaccinations or masks or lockdowns.
The H1N1 influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic is still around, but it does not cause death to young people (the T cell factor, most likely) as it did in 1918. Obviously, H1N1 immunity spread (which always me wonder why we need a new flu shot every year–it flu immunity not durable for some reason, and yet it seems to be, I’m confused about what I’ve read about it). However, many microbiologists think that it “attenuated”–became less virulent. Which would mean it would confer immunity widely but not kill its victims.
It’s been about 18 months since this started in Wuhan–just using the timeline that I was following in the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story of the hospitals filling up in Wuhan. By the time the reporters realized what was happening, the virus had been in full swing for over six weeks. I have always believed the first cases occurred in late October 2019. Which puts the end date 18 months later at late March 2021.
Reading what you’ve written about the death toll in India in comparison to the United States puts a lot of weight on the attenuation theory. It is a variant, it’s still contagious, but it’s not as virulent as it was when it started.
Perhaps this is what the microbiologists were freaking out about when this started in Wuhan–why the use of the word “novel” to describe this virus, even though it was actually a variant of existing coronaviruses we were familiar with, upset the virology world so spectacularly.
There is a great deal of data the microbiologists will need to sort out in the next ten years. Once it stops killing people, and the virus seems to be headed in that direction, we will learn a lot.
If this pandemic follows the same timeline as the Spanish flu, and it certainly looks like it is doing so, wow, we can actually formulate some scientific “laws” for how these things go around the world. The Spanish flu as a one-time event was hard to learn from. But now we have two of the events. That’s good. We can learn a lot now.
I think that we need better regional numbers. I suspect that the timing of outbreaks in Kashmir is not the same as in the south. In the USA, the first northeast state peaks were 10-14 days ahead of the mid-atlantic and the southern tier peaked in late July. A graph of the US as a whole would show a national spike in the summer which was not happening in the midwest or northeast but was happening from Fl across to southern CA. National graphs can be misleading.
So the big smooth curve may be a function of merging a bunch of distinct trends into a (less informative) national average and not the result of any fudging.
Reporting delays (especially deaths) or late batches can produce spikes in a US state curve but the sheer size of the numbers in India would likely reduce the appearance of such spikes from regional reporting batching.
I don’t know whether testing frequency has increased at the same rate as in the US. Or whether the classification of COVID deaths has been consistent. If the death reports are accurate, India is experiencing the same total numbers of deaths per day as the worst week in Ma and NY. So on a per million basis it would not seem “ferocious.”
I also have no basis to evaluate how well India is prepared for a surge in hospitalizations. They may have a lower tipping point.
Postscript to my comment 9:
SARS 1 burned out after 18 months mysteriously. That’s why the scientists stopped working on a vaccine. The drug companies couldn’t rationalize paying for it at that point.
I have been wondering if SARS 1 didn’t actually disappear but merely attenuated, meaning that people who got it had a mild or bad cold and didn’t pay any attention to it. If I am right about that, it would explain the weird Diamond Princess numbers: 80 percent of the passengers tested negative for this virus. They apparently had some innate immunity to SARS 2. My theory would explain how that happened.
The timeframe makes perfect sense.
Spanish flu may have been a return of a similar virus from 40+ years earlier. It has been surmised that older people did far better than expected against the Spanish flu because many had been exposed when young to something very similar.
I don’t know what to make of the attenuation theory. It makes Darwinian sense but why couldn’t it be that the virus gets promptly to its preferred and most vulnerable targets and then becomes statistically less lethal simply because those most vulnerable are already dead. That is related to the “try tinder” hypothesis that the higher the death rate in a flu season, the less likely the following season or two will be as lethal simply because a higher share of the vulnerable will have already been picked off and are not available to be killed by successive flus.
The work that really needs doing is on the mechanics of transmission. The tired cliched emphasis on modeling coughs and sneezes instead of viability and duration of much finer aerosols has been a barrier to understanding. Is there some tweak in humidity or other way to mess with the lipid envelope such that enclosed air-conditioned spaces can be more like safe spaces instead of the prime feeding ground of COVID? We know the thing is rather picky about the combination of environmental factors so how do we use that?
We also need to examine the gross misuse of science. The consensus science of responding to respiratory pandemics in 2019 was that (1) these things would follow a Gompertz curve–the Imperial college model and other geniuses said no–it could just take off in an indefintae rise (they were wrong); (2) border closings were likely useless once the thing is already out (we saw futile efforts in increasing order of pointlessness: Trump and China, Biden and India and the Mayor of The District of Columbia and red states; (3) lockdowns may have short term benefits to “flatten the curve” but the gains quickly diminish if the lockdowns are extended and longer stretches involve other costs likely to be horrific (we did it anyway for months); (4) Mask use was likely a marginal help at best (we made it a religious civic duty).
The bad policy choices that cost so much, that damaged the credibility of institutions and government and inflicted harms yet to unfold were almost all the result of a refusal by Leaders/Experts to admit upfront just how little we could really do with what tools we have at hand. The charade of control and the credentialed traitors to science who abetted this lethal farce have to be denied the accolades they are already claiming and held accountable for a massive, horrible fiction. That may be the most important task of all.
Now this might actually do the trick!
Ridiculous! The elephants will trample you anyway, if you don’t snap your fingers as well.
Basically, India was not hit hard by covid last year, and it is being hit by it this year, though to levels that don’t even come close to many places in the world. The one thing about India that could be considered “tragic,” in the general sense, is that it has a pretty awful healthcare system, which is incapable of responding to any amount of strain.
Other than that, you have more fear-mongering from a media that is scrambling for ratings now that the covid cash-cow is almost fully a thing of the past. Expect another rise in hysteria this fall and winter, especially if there is nothing good to report about Democrats. Our media is now a propaganda arm of the Democratic party (even, sadly, much of the WSJ); that it still holds the amount of power and influence that it does in this country is ridiculous.
I like this post! Most of our populace is numerically and algebraically illiterate, and so easily fooled by statistics. Left-wing media loves to dwell on the absolute case and death numbers of the United States because it sounds so terrible. The main reason we have so many cases and deaths is that we have been the largest country affected by the virus so far, until India came along. They ignore the fact that more than a dozen other countries have higher case rates and death rates. Nobody in the news is having conniptions over Hungary, with the world’s highest death rate from Covid. It is 15 times higher than India’s. But the total number of deaths in Hungary is relatively small because it is a fairly small country.
I wanna just shake some of these journalists!
No, I didn’t know about that movie. But that’s a fascinating reference.
The best skit Garrison Keilor ever did on his radio show was about how this works in the movie industry. A guy is trying to sell movie producers on the idea of making a movie out of the book, Heidi. They like it, but want to make a few changes. By the time they’re done with it, they have the old Swiss grandfather operating a deli in Long Beach, and Heidi is a helicopter pilot for the LAPD. All movies become all the other movies. I’ve searched high and low for a recording of that skit, but it has never been among the recordings sold by Prairie Home Companion, or whoever owns the rights to it now. It was one that was done not too long after the program went national, i.e. back in the days when it was funny (but I think not before Keilor came down with a bad case of RDS).
Did they preempt the end of a football game to show the movie?
From Newsweek:
COVID cases in Mumbai down 70%- slowing elsewhere.
COVID-19 cases in Mumbai declined by nearly 70% in the past week, from 11,000 daily cases to fewer than 2,000 a day in India’s financial capital.
With active cases over 3.6 million, hospitals are still swamped by patients. With over 24 million confirmed cases and 270,000 deaths, India’s caseload is the second highest after the U.S.
But experts believe that the country’s steeply rising curve may finally be flattening—even if the plateau is a high one.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
Izhaar Hussain Shaikh, an ambulance driver in Mumbai, drove about 70 patients to the hospital last month. Two weeks into May, he’d carried only 10 patients.
“We used to be so busy before, we didn’t even have time to eat,” Shaikh said.
The success was credited to a well-enforced lockdown and vigilant authorities, along with testing and other resources being able to make it to the more populated areas of India.
Even the capital of New Delhi is seeing faint signs of improvement as infections slacken after weeks of tragedy and desperation playing out in overcrowded hospitals and crematoriums and on the streets.
As I have said before, taking credit for a COVID wave receding is like claiming that effective anti-aircraft strategies and technologies caused Japanese aircraft to leave Pearl Harbor. It is pure superstition to look around for some policy magic that made the bad thing retreat when it clearly retreated on its own terms within its own pattern.
Clearly, you don’t know what science is. Science is not a process of investigating the world by means of making theories and predictions that don’t fit all possible sets of data and then testing them with experiments likely to accumulate relevant data.
No, it’s definitely not that.
Science is a method of giving intellectual respectability to uninformed denunciations of Republicans.
No, they didn’t, but they should have. (I hadn’t known that story.)
Thanks for that addition. So maybe there was some justification for using the term “ferocious.” But I think they could have put something in the blurb about “overwhelming India’s facilities with a milder version of the pandemic than we’re seeing elsewhere.”
The numbers are suspect.
https://news.sky.com/story/india-crematoriums-underreporting-bodies-as-suspicion-grows-over-true-number-of-coronavirus-deaths-12288828
Thanks for the additional information.
I wonder, though. Is it really desirable for people to start distrusting government data?
I’ll tell you this much: J. S. Mill (see here) and Confucius (here) are right that society needs trust, and that trust needs trustworthiness. We’d be better off if governments, and people in general, were more trustworthy.
One other difference between the United States and India is life expectancy. In India, as of 2019 it was approximately 70 years; in the United States, it’s approximately 78. I wonder if the patients in India are slightly younger and better able to recover from covid-19. Also, we’ve learned a lot about treatment in the past year. I would think that too would lead to better outcomes.
Not to mention that the United States counts everybody who dies and happens to have had Covid recently, as a Covid death, even in cases when no Covid has been detected through testing. The CDC guidelines require only that a doctor suspects that a decedent had Covid.
Would be good to have some documentation on that. And also some idea of how many deaths it could account for.