jayakris wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2020 1:57 am...but I think, looking at the cases in the most foreign-connected place, Kerala (and they are REALLY good in healthcare management), maybe the numbers are fine
I guess others feel this way too, seeing this facebook post from a Mr. Balaji Viswanathan, CEO of Invento Robotics, from Bengaluru. Total taken with so many doctors & health professionals: 20min and ₹0 .. Good read, where he says "I have never seen any system [of healthcare or otherwise] in any part of the world that was this efficient."... But I liked the end of his post:
India has not fallen victim to any major global epidemic in over a century and you have to thank such women and men for that. Smallpox, Plague, Polio, HIV have all been fought back with ruthless efficiency and bravery. Corona bro, I feel sorry for you man.
depleter wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2020 7:49 am
With so many of these "running away from the hospital" news coming out now, I doubt the number will be low for long. With the peak yet to come these type of selfish behavior will push the numbers much higher.
Yep... This story was so depressing. - Coronavirus: Infected techie’s wife fled Bengaluru by air, took Delhi-Agre train, tests +ve
How much more irresponsible can you be? And she might've given it to the whole family, in addition to people in the train. Good to see that the Magistrate and the police got involved. Yeah, you have to call the police on this kind of thing.
But, maybe there is more to the story. Why would she leave her ill husband, right after their honeymoon? Poor fellow!
jayakris wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2020 9:20 am
But, maybe there is more to the story. Why would she leave her ill husband, right after their honeymoon? Poor fellow!
Contrary to earlier reports, she hadn’t stepped in Bengaluru city and had gone from the airport to Delhi directly.
But I am really worried about the Maharashtra situation. That tour party from Dubai sounded like trouble, when we heard of the first cases of the people who drove to Pune. It seems like now there are 31 cases in Maha. Getting worried. No sign (yet) of any breakouts anywhere else.
Seems like most Western countries' response and rates are very similar. Japan is the only different one. Some folks in Taiwan (where I was the last few days) say that Japan is not releasing the real data. Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are the best stories in this case. Story With respect to India, I do not know what to make of it. There is a lot of propaganda as usual but the key question is how many have we tested and how?
It is not a western vs eastern issue. It is still a weather issue. The rate of transmission is much lower in warmer places, everywhere around the globe. A week or so ago, it seemed like almost no transmission (maybe less than 50 out of 100K in the world) had happened at temperatures above 18 to 20 C, but now we can see that somewhere around 500-600 have happened in such weathers. About 5000 cases in warm weathers like in India, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Taiwan, etc (over 90 percent of them are people who came from abroad from cooler places).
Basically the exhalation droplets with the virus falls on surfaces and if anybody touches and then touches their nose/mouth, there is almost guaranteed transmission. The virus just does not seem to survive too long in warm weather on surfaces. My estimate is that it is about 1/10th of the time in 20 degrees, compared to 10 degrees. That means 10 times lower probability for somebody to pick it up. Maybe closer population etc may increase it to 1/5th or something in places like Indonesia or India. For somebody looking at evidence, that is all we can guess.
The numbers India is giving are pretty legit for now (it won't be once it gets out of the richer homes and starts infecting the poor communities). Don't buy the BS the western media is saying that India isn't testing. Places like Kerala and Pune are no chicken feed in health care. Only the foreign returnees (typically not poor) are currently infected, and they are getting tested quite extensively, along with many people getting in contact with them.
The problem is that if "community transmission" starts in villages or poorer communities, all bests are off and Indian numbers on testing and infections will all start becoming very unreliable. For the time being, it's not because we are not testing that our numbers are low. It is just because the virus isn't surviving too long in the warm weather. But it does survive for some time and does transmit.
With the population density we have in poorer urban communities, even at 1/10th rate of what it is in Milan or Seattle, it could become a nightmare in India too. Just pray.
How do we know that some businessman from Kolkata and China or someone ferrying products to say Thailand etc. did not get infected and spread the disease in India? The symptoms may be the same as that of flu and the death rate for flu would hardly budge for things to be noticeable. I am not so sure that we have the numbers right. The U.S. did not have it right even a few days ago and perhaps does not have it right even now. We may never know. Maybe the deaths are being recorded as old guy died of fever in the rural areas. And, people are wandering around with a slight cough that happens to everyone because of the pollution, etc.
Hey, doctors in India are not that clueless. The facilities may be quite substandard and they may not be able to treat it well especially if somebody needs ventillator etc, but the doctors in places like Kolkata, Hyderbad and Bhubaneswar are all surely aware of this. They just haven't found cases. It is very easy to get it tested in India and the testing is at 1/5th of their capacity right now (many labs' guys sitting around and waiting for samples to be sent, reportedly). Nothing is happening in many many cities where the doctors are looking around.
Symptoms are actually NOT the same as for flu. Almost no nasal congestion, dry cough, and much more of breathing difficulties 3 days into it. The doctors know all over. The death-rate is also very very different - almost 10 to 30 times more than for the seasonal flu, though all for ages over 75. If 500 people (instead of the reported 100) were infected in India, there would be 50 people needing ventilators with several dying within 2-3 days (old people). No such deaths have happened and they have tested several dead people retroactively for Covid too. I'm talking about cities. Like I said, once it gets into the villages, or to very poor urban communities, all bets are off.
I am generally just shocked by how unprepared humanity has been.
It was very evident to me in mid-to-late Jan that this was the greatest global pandemic in a century, but somehow most of the world decided to carry on as normal for another 6-8 weeks which were crucial to cut transmission (and even now people are still going to pubs etc).
Now, we are going to do wide-scale global experiments on how to best survive this. UK has decided that containment is no longer possible and would rather slowly bleed in herd immunity over the next 8-12 months (at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of people dying).
I am with you, Sin Hombre. I had the same feeling from late January or at least early February. The whole world wasted a minimum of 4-5 weeks to get started. Not getting ready with test kits and plans to ramp up their production and to be ready to do testing was the real mistake at that point. Thanks to WHO, most of the world was ready for that. Thanks to Clueless-in-Chief, one country didn't even listen to WHO and screwed up even that.
I could even pardon people for not taking it that seriously when it was primarily only in China. But TWO days after the Korea breakout started in Daegu on February 20th and 300-400 were stricken in a couple of days, the world should have known to immediately start airport screening and all kinds of things. They all waited for an extra 10 to 14 days, and THAT was unpardonable. I guess people didn't know how advanced S. Korea is in their healthcare and how efficient the country generally is. The thinking should've been, "if this is happening from one church patient in S. Korea of all places, we are in trouble". Instead the westerners took it as a problem in some unhealthy snake- and dog-eating third world place or something.
Maybe because I follow Korea very closely, I knew immediately by March 20th, and I told my wife that we were canceling a trip planned for April 2nd week to Korea.
We all knew, and you had said (what would've been shocking to the world) on Feb 26th that "heck, the Olympics may get cancelled". On Feb 27th, when my wife returned from India through Hong Kong and saw absolutely nothing new at LAX, I knew that we were in deep trouble. The people who went totally unchecked in and out of the US have carried it to so many places now (Australia for one).
The point is that not too many people came from China (or Korea) to the rest of the world with the virus in January and February, except the initial few that had gone to Iran, Italy, etc. This current outbreak is being fueled by people who came out during Feb 20th through March 5th from Europe, and not people from Asia, which had done a pretty damn good job of containing it in China, Korea, Japan. The western countries' leaders (led by the Clueless in Chief) did nothing for a crucial 10 day period, and people went in and out of Italy and US and soon through so many other places to take it everywhere. Iran too, but they can get excused as a country unable to do much. Ridiculously irresponsible leaders (and their followers) in so many countries caused this calamity.
Feels like this will be the seminal event of this era. How having a certain percentage of the population and world leaders being irresponsible is going to lead to significant carnage for all of the world.
The Malayalam newspapers are filled with stories of police going after foreigners in vacation who try to escape quarantine (probably bribing hospital folks). The funny thing is that they all get caught with 4-5 hours! Kerala has been publishing every patient's activity for the previous 4-5 days in full details (precise shops and restaurants they went to, and the times) as soon as the test results come. Whole cyber cells of Engineering students have been set up by district collectors to do GPS tracing of the phones of patients and those under observation (while clueless in chief in the US is begging for Google to help do it, and trying to take credit for what California had already asked Google to do for the state, by the way).
Numbers announced by the health minister Mrs. KK Shailaja this evening for Kerala - 21 confirmed cases. 10,944 people under observation (299 in hospitals). 2147 sampes sent for test so far, 1514 negative, 21 positive and the remaining samples' (about 600) results awaited. She said there are 5150 foreign tourists in Kerala right now too (a figure that surprised me. I thought they had no clue on that!). I wish I could see such numbers from the US. Fat chance.
I hate the Leftists in Kerala with a passion, but they are good in governance when such things happen. The leftists by nature love getting an excuse to go after people with the police, after all. I will excuse KK Shailaja.
The numbers in Malaysia almost doubled today. 238 to 428. The kind of thing that scares me. That is probably a flare-out. India is sticking at 8 to 15 cases a day for about 5 days now (at 112 now). I do not want to see a sudden 85 new cases in Kerala, Maharashtra or somewhere. Again, cross your fingers and pray!
