Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

[jayakris]

USA goes ahead of China with highest number of cases now. No. of deaths are of course much much lower in US.

I guess it's probably a little too early to talk about the US death rate, as some 60K of the current 85K happened over basically FIVE days (amazing as it may seem). We don't know what fraction of these folks will eventually lose the battle. It doesn't look like it will be higher than 2% in the US though. May even end up in the 1 to 1.5% range. Certainly not in the 10% rate that Italy showed.

[jayakris]

But this site says deceased as 16 but i think it has risen to 20.

The 16 is correct. 20 deaths have happened, but they remove the patients who had tested negative before death. There are some who got free of the virus, but had all kinds of other issues and then had hart attack, kidney failure etc. They are not counted in the end. I think they are waiting on that confirmation on a couple of the latest deaths. Actually about 22 or so deaths have happened, but 2 or 3 were already removed from the list. The 16 may go up to 18 or 19 soon though.

[RohitG]

If that's the case then it's bad. It's like applying cosmetics on a wound but not curing it.. or adding fantastic garnish to a badly made dish. Analogies aside, what paths do we really have? Are we clutching at straws here? We don't have that many kits to conduct Korea style testing on population of our scale.. Can't have full lockdown because logistically its near impossible to ensure supplies for, again the population of our scale. Groceries and Pharmacies are kept open but people aren't fully following social distancing based on images in media. The layman in me asks, can't govt like set aside 500 crore like big-ss amount to buy kits from Europe and domestically and brute force it's way to imitate Korea on a big scale along with partial lockdown? It won't be as successful but the current approach doesn't seem convincing anymore because it is not a total lockdown

[SaniaFan]

But this site says deceased as 16 but i think it has risen to 20.

The 16 is correct. 20 deaths have happened, but they remove the patients who had tested negative before death. There are some who got free of the virus, but had all kinds of other issues and then had hart attack, kidney failure etc. They are not counted in the end. I think they are waiting on that confirmation on a couple of the latest deaths. Actually about 22 or so deaths have happened, but 2 or 3 were already removed from the list. The 16 may go up to 18 or 19 soon though.

But are those deaths not also because of coronavirus? I mean someone dying just few days after recovering and of something like heart attack or renal failure.

[sameerph]

If that's the case then it's bad. It's like applying cosmetics on a wound but not curing it.. or adding fantastic garnish to a badly made dish. Analogies aside, what paths do we really have? Are we clutching at straws here? We don't have that many kits to conduct Korea style testing on population of our scale.. Can't have full lockdown because logistically its near impossible to ensure supplies for, again the population of our scale. Groceries and Pharmacies are kept open but people aren't fully following social distancing based on images in media. The layman in me asks, can't govt like set aside 500 crore like big-ss amount to buy kits from Europe and domestically and brute force it's way to imitate Korea on a big scale along with partial lockdown? It won't be as successful but the current approach doesn't seem convincing anymore because it is not a total lockdown

It is almost a total lockdown now except people going out to buy groceries and vegetables ? and some people working in essantial services industry getting out like hospitals, municipal employees, press etc. Goverment has to try to find a way to reduce crowd of people going to buy groceries and vegetable. Maharashtra government yesterday announced that grocery shops are allowed to be kept open 24 hours. Currently, it is getting crowded because people are stocking up a lot due to panick situation. If they are assured that these supplies will continue for 21 days unhindered, the crowding will be less.

I agree about ramping up testing part.

[depleter]

If that's the case then it's bad. It's like applying cosmetics on a wound but not curing it.. or adding fantastic garnish to a badly made dish. Analogies aside, what paths do we really have? Are we clutching at straws here? We don't have that many kits to conduct Korea style testing on population of our scale.. Can't have full lockdown because logistically its near impossible to ensure supplies for, again the population of our scale. Groceries and Pharmacies are kept open but people aren't fully following social distancing based on images in media. The layman in me asks, can't govt like set aside 500 crore like big-ss amount to buy kits from Europe and domestically and brute force it's way to imitate Korea on a big scale along with partial lockdown? It won't be as successful but the current approach doesn't seem convincing anymore because it is not a total lockdown

TBF this might actually be on cards if we see the way icmr is buying the kits left and right. More than 10 days back they have announced that they have 200K kits in hand and are ordering more than 1 million more from outside. This week they have given licenses to more than 10 companies domestically. And now they have went on and invited quotations 3 times in a span of 2 days. And the 3 orders total amount to 2.2 million kits.

[jayakris]

The layman in me asks, can't govt like set aside 500 crore like big-ss amount to buy kits from Europe and domestically and brute force it's way to imitate Korea on a big scale along with partial lockdown? It won't be as successful but the current approach doesn't seem convincing anymore because it is not a total lockdown

Kits are really not a huge problem now. We can test 10000 a day for 3-4 weeks if we want and will be getting additional kits made in India by then. So it is not an issue.

Initially they had to wait till something started, so we started with airports. Korea also did that. It is just that the number of air passengers coming to Korea as a fraction of the population was much higher. They had to immediately start because of the travelers from China (I don't have the numbers but probably 10 times the pax volume between India and China and thus 250 times as a fraction of the country's population; just a guess). So Korea did that from January and the testing numbers kept adding up. In India, if we had tried to do it from January, we would be getting no positives, so they waited for at least some positives to start coming to ramp it up. As of 10 days ago, when I posted the stats, India had one of the lowest ratio of positives from among tests, in the world. We still has one of the lowest. In other words, we didn't have to test for a while and our numbers were going to be low. They feared running out of kits in a month and then having a delayed explosion, and that was a legitimate concern. So they did take steps, and had even Indian test-kit company approved and ready in no time recently. I don't find any fault in what we were doing till a few days ago (may be 5 days). Where could we go and test in the 1.35 billion population? Just go out in and test every flu patient? If you tested all flu patients in India, we would have run out of test kits in 3 days probably, and would have got some 400 positives 10 days ago. What was the use? They followed a plan which was quite reasonable.

But now we know the places where the breakouts are possible to have happened. We should be testing a lot more flu patients in certain localities. The Government allowed the testing of all respiratory illness patients 6 days ago (but those samples may not be coming from hospitals in large enough numbers, I suspect). I think we need to relax it even further to anybody with Covid-like flu symptoms in certain towns and localities. That is like what Korea did in Daegu after feb 20th when the flare started there. We need to do it in about 3-4 places now. But the lockdown has bought us some breathing space to attempt some of that.

[rajitghosh]

Since this has not spread in the slums so far I think we can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that the Indian immunity is helping in keeping this disease at bay. Lockdowns cannot work in slums where people live in close proximity and use common toilets. No spread in such circumstances is a huge positive.

[suresh]

4 cases in the slums of Bombay being reported today.

[jayakris]

My wife just forwarded me a WhatsApp item that actually makes some sense that I hadn't seen elsewhere (an extreme rarity on WhatsApp!)... Maps of countries least affected by Covid-19 and the map of countries that have the highest Malaria rates. It makes a correlation that people in the Malaria countries may have some sort of herd immunity to it, that works against Covid-19 unlike those in countries without it. India being a Malaria country too, we may have herd immunity. I went, hmmmm.....

If Malaria medicine Hydroxycholoroquine is indeed helpful to fight Covid-19, then the above item also meshes nicely with it. Malaria resistance is what is probably needed for Covid-19 immunity, in that case.

So I looked at where Malaria is most prevalent within India, to see if it applies among Indians too. Tada, they seem to be generally places where we have very few cases of Covid-19 now, too. Higher resistance to it in Bihar, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Odisha, and the North east states. See the orange and blue areas in Fig.5 of this article - http://www.mrcindia.org/MRC_profile/pro ... 0India.pdf ... The total number of cases from those areas so far is just 20 out of the 750. That is striking, even within india. Kerala, which I believe has the lowest malaria rate, sure enough, has the most Covid-19 cases!!!

By the way, all of Bangladesh has a 2.6 people per 1000 Malaria burden. They would be an orange area if they were included in the figure. The total number of cases in Bangladesh (8th most populous country in the world, 1/8th of our population) is just 44 cases so far.

No authoritative source has said anything about this, so take it with a pinch of salt. There may be something to this! In fact I am reasonably convinced that there is.

[Omkara]

But this site says deceased as 16 but i think it has risen to 20.

Now it says deceased 18 so yes on that way. Worrying is it has spread to the slums

[jayakris]

Omkara. Maybe the slums have much better Malaria resistance. I am feeling more and more confident that the puzzle is solved on what is going on!!

[jayakris]

If that's the case then it's bad. It's like applying cosmetics on a wound but not curing it.. or adding fantastic garnish to a badly made dish.

They started doing that because of the Italian guy who was in Jaipur with the 11-member tour group who tested positive. The Govt hospital cured him with the HIV-cocktail, and he got 2 negatives. Then he got up and went to a private hospital. Stayed there for three days, and had a heart attack as he had all kinds of other issues like high BP. The Jaipur doctors and the Govt were mad, naturally! That was our 6th death (iirc). They didn't count it. They then stuck with the practice.

I think it may be done in other countries too. There is an argument that people who are in very bad health condition and were going to die for other reasons anyway and a hospitalization due to Covid only made it quicker, it shouldn't be called a death due to Covid-19 if they were cured of Covid-19. That may be the international convention too. If a person died 10 due to stroke 10 days after getting cured of a flu, that won't be called a flu death. So ather than determining how many days is th cutoff, the convention may be that getting tested negative for an ailment before the death means the death is not due to th ailment.

But it is so far probably 15-20% of the cases. May be 3-4 cases like that.

[sameerph]

23 cases in Islampur near Sagli, Maharashtra. 4 for those who came from Saudi Arabia and others are all who came in contact of them. This looks like a case of community transmission which can explode.

[SaniaFan]

I think suddenly the speed of confirmed cases is increasing. I think there are 128 more cases in less than 24 hours. Somehow it is not looking good. I am in Bangalore and have not gone out at all for last 2 weeks. But with online ordering and deliveries still not working I may have to go out to get groceries. I think same may be true for others and even that may be a trigger for rush at the grocery shops and hence may cause the spread.