Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by suresh »

This is on the total number of tests in Delhi: Typo or readjustment?

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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by jayakris »

^^^ No idea, as I have not seen proper official responses on it. My guess is that they removed the Antigen tests from the count.

The problem is that adding the antigen tests is a little weird because it will miss some of the positives (generally the very asymptomatic or low viral load cases, who really needn't be counted as cases, but are counted in India as they turn RT-PCR positive). But the false positives are very low on antigen tests, so what is counted as positives should be counted. So they are counted in the case count and used for hospitalization and treatment purposes. So if you take out the Antigen test count and use the case count then the positivity will be unfairly higher.

No idea what is right way to count antigen tests. There doesn't seem to be an international consensus on this either. But we know that the large test numbers for lot of countries, as shown at worldometers, are from antigen tests. India on the other hand has been using primarily RT-PCR, and have used antigen tests only since mid-June.
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by jayakris »

Good news. For the first time in some 3 months, the Mumbai positivity fell below 20%... 5241 tests and 969 positives (BMC number) for 18.5% ... The positivity has been steadily dropping by about 2 or 3 percent week to week, as I compare the same days of the week.
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by sameerph »

Good news, I am only wondering why they are not increasing tests to about 10000 tests a day which seems to be the testing capacity in Mumbai as per some earlier reports. I read a quote from IS Chahal a few days ago saying private labs are not able to give results in 1-2 days if they take up too many tests. That means there may be a shortage of trained personnel who can do tests and produce results overall in Mumbai which is a sad state after 4 months in pandemic.
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by Atithee »

Foot-operated taps, copper coating and ionised AC air – a peek into Indian Railways ‘Post-Covid’ coaches:

https://indianexpress.com/article/india ... s-6505330/
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by jayakris »

I don't know if any of you remember me saying one day a long time ago, maybe 2+ months ago, that all the bad areas then were in a polygon from Bombay to Ahmedabad to Delhi to Meerut to Hyderabad and back to Mumbai (Mumbai, Pune, Surat, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Udaipur, Gurugram, Delhi, Meerut, Noida, Agra, Indore, Bhopal).

How things have changed! See today's summary. With the areas away from Delhi in Haryana also leaving the bad areas list today, except for 4 districts outside MMR in Maharashtra, all the bad areas are OUTSIDE of that polygon I talked about. Now they are in Kerala, TN, KAR, AP, TEL, ODI, BIH, WB, ASM and the Northeast. (Thiruvananthapuram last week and Kanyakumari district in Kerala are the latest two places where local transmission started - as it really has reached fully to the southern tip)

There is indeed pattern to this spread into the local areas within all states. Just give it a little bit more time for these latest areas to calm down (they will). It may take a month or two more, I guess. Or sooner. At some point, the bad areas that add half the cases from 1/4th the areas, will start shrinking and the daily additions graph will flatten.

There are pockets in Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, and even eastern Maharashtra to still start local stransmission, but with non-urban areas of Bihar and UP now fully in the bad list (but with low growth in UP and hopefully so in Bihar also soon), the damn thing has spread to most places.

Maharashtra still has the Nagpur area left. Incidentally Nagpur is the geographic center of India and probably the city that is farthest away from top-10 cities than any top-25 city in India. I won't be surprised if Nagpur is the last city to fall in our top-25 cities.

But ultimately it will get everywhere, finish with a growth and drop in those areas, and we will see our total numbers dropping. It looks more and more like it is the time it takes for it to get to every part of India (thanks to Railways still not being open) that is really delaying the peak formation in India. It is all a good thing, in a way, even if it may give a chance for those like Rahul Gandhi to keep saying that we are totally failing at this fight. Let us hope for this distributed and time-lagged growth and drop to happen without a lot of deaths and without us running out of masks/PPEs/ventilators, which would've surely happened, had the spread reached everywhere too fast.

Keep hope up!
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by jayakris »

ICMR Update: 12,412,664 Total tests... Tuesday tests: 320,161... Ouch. So, will we see 33K tomorrow at the current positivity rate, or will the positivity come down? I'm scared to look at the numbers that are about to come out on Wednesday!

We should probably be testing at 500K per day right now, but okay, I can live with this! At least it went up some 15% from last week.

Lab count update: +17 to 1223. Good!

Wednesday starts with -655 in the Unassigned category. Now there are only 1524 total in that column which was over 10K at one time.
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by sameerph »

jayakris wrote: Tue Jul 14, 2020 7:45 pm
But ultimately it will get everywhere, finish with a growth and drop in those areas, and we will see our total numbers dropping. It looks more and more like it is the time it takes for it to get to every part of India (thanks to Railways still not being open) that is really delaying the peak formation in India. It is all a good thing, in a way, even if it may give a chance for those like Rahul Gandhi to keep saying that we are totally failing at this fight. Let us hope for this distributed and time-lagged growth and drop to happen without a lot of deaths and without us running out of masks/PPEs/ventilators, which would've surely happened, had the spread reached everywhere too fast.

Keep hope up!
Yes, it seems a patten that it reaches a peak at some point of time in every country/region and then drops and settles down at a level where daily cases continue to remain stable at lower level. In bigger countries, peak happens more at regional level and it takes a long time for the whole nation to get a peak. Just as US getting a big second wave, saw this article about New York-

New York City reports zero new deaths from Covid-19 for the first time in months

Same thing may happen in India. As now it seems Mumbai, Delhi are dropping , Bangalore and Hyedrabad are flaring up. So, i guess it may take a month or so for us to reach a nationwide peak.
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by sameerph »

I suppose inter city travel is much more open now in US than in India. Still I wonder how NY cases continue to drop even as California, Texas and Florida are rising. Are there people not travelling from thoese regions to NY which brings the cases back up there ? It is understandable in India as trains and flights are still operating at perhaps only 20-25% of full capacity but how it is not happening in US.
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by prasen9 »

New York requires a 14 day quarantine for people coming from the 17 states that are hotspots now. They have proposed heavy fines for people caught breaking that quarantine requirement. That perhaps dissuades most people from these states from going there but I am sure there are people doing so under the covers and not getting caught.

I said a long time ago that the coronavirus issue is more like whack-a-mole over time. It actually turns out to be more so over space these days. Spacetime - the final frontier, but that's all we have.
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by jayakris »

Yep. It is all a metter of space and time. Pretty clear.

There are data blips because there is some serious variation in how each state does things. India really needs to have more coordination in the strategies, but the central government just does not have any power in the health-care area to make the states follow a common pattern of testing, quarantining, containment and treating, as I am realizing now. Anyway, despite the vast variation, the central limit theorem seems to apply and things do seem to even out. For every TEL that does things at one extreme, there is a blood-brother AP that does the other extreme (both are seriously annoying me now :) )

Just need to wait this out. It is becoming more and more clear. Maybe 2 months more before we see that no place is flaring and everybody is sort of flat or dropping slowly. It may be 3 or 4 million cases by the time we get there, too. But probably only 1 million active cases that are distributed all over India at the maximum.

I am hoping for it all to happen much sooner, like in 2 weeks, but that is hoping for too much. That hope is on the basis of the cases per population level where the peak and drop happened in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the reducing number of urban areas to catch fire, as I said before.
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by jayakris »

Nobody should be bragging about how well they handled this virus.

Countries with serious second waves going (starting from almost zero cases after they supposedly did so great as to kill it!) --- Israel, Australia and Japan. These are not the small flares or anything. These are full-fledged growth again just like the first time (or worse). I hadn't checked much in the last 10 days or so, and find that those countries have become nearly as bad as the first time, in a big hurry. Take a look - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries and click on those countries to see the daily graphs.

Of course, I said right from the beginning that Kerala was being seriously over-praised. It is 7% local transmission growth there now.

Nobody should brag. We should check at the end of the year where all the countries are. India is probably the one country that has had the most stable type of evolution through this process. Smooth curves so far... that keep going with no end in sight :)
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by kujo »

sameerph wrote: Wed Jul 15, 2020 5:18 am I suppose inter city travel is much more open now in US than in India. Still I wonder how NY cases continue to drop even as California, Texas and Florida are rising. Are there people not travelling from thoese regions to NY which brings the cases back up there ? It is understandable in India as trains and flights are still operating at perhaps only 20-25% of full capacity but how it is not happening in US.

Here are two relevant articles that are interesting to read and will answer your question.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... us/614035/

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/roughly ... -says.html

And of course the daily case graph for New York:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/new-york/

Keep in mind the political leadership and rules enforcement at state level matters - the fines and mandatory quarantine for out of state travelers, the mask mandate, reduced occupancy requirements inside buildings, etc...
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by jayakris »

ICMR Update: 12,739,490 total ... Wednesday tests: 326,826. So it went up 7K more. Should expect 33K tomorrow, at the current positivity rate. Lab count update: +11 to 1234.

We just went past UK to and have now done the third most tests behind USA (45 million) and Russia (24 million). We are still testing about 50% less than we need to. We should be testing at the 450K-500K range per day, but our overall positivity of 7.6% is well within the WHO recommended 10%, though we have been going a little bit over it to 10.2% or so, lately.

And Thursday starts with a +301 (EDIT: -239] in the unassigned category, so add that too. We should look for 33.5K tomorrow. Ouch, ouch... :(

Kachara or Himanta Dada will take the honors to push us over 1 million cases Thursday.
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Re: Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

Post by jayakris »

Here is Soutik Biswas' BBC article on some interesting quick research by Abhijit Banerjee's team out of MIT (funded by NSF, USA) in West Bengal, on comparing the effect of messages from a Nobel laureate (himself) and the regular Government messages. His message helped, as they find!

Here is Prof. Banerjee's working paper that MIT just put up, as linked in the article.

Can we get Prof. Banerjee to send a message to the officials in Maharashtra that there is a concept called testing for pandemic control? :) ... Nothing else, even 200+ deaths a day, seems to make those guys understand that you need to test a minimum of 8 or 10 people per every positive you get any day.
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