It was not at all through testing and tracing that they got over it in Mumbai. It was a super job of containment, and only that (thank Chahal and Ashwini Bhide for that). They can't do that in other urban areas, except some much smaller slums in Pune etc. They did that in Pune, but Pune regular urban areas and village are all flaring because nobody is doing contact tracing. 32K tests today in Maharashtra, where it should 100K a day now. Fine, do at least 60 or 70K. Uttar Pradesh with 1/6th of the cases did 42K today, so it is not impossible. Uddhav did set up 100+ labs too. But still didn't know that you have to do contact tracing.
Nobody in the state stresses on testing or tracing. Not a single official (no IAS officer, no health person, and no minister) ever said a word about contact tracing. It is now down to finding 3 contacts per positive while 10 is a minimum. Okay, I can live with 7 or 8 too. But 3 is what Mexico and Brazil does. That basically means the 2 or 3 that are infected by a person is just found later when they get infected. Almost ZERO contact tracing.
We know how bad it is, when we read a Navi Mumbai official makes the newspaper write an article about this new scheme called "contact tracing", as recently as yesterday. In Navi Mumbai. We aren't talking some small town in Akola district.
Back to square one with what we started with. Half of the spread in India was seeded by migrants from Maharashtra, and 1/3rd of our cases are still there.
Can you believe that only 9 countries in the world which includes BRA and MEX (just ahead of them) have more cases than Maharashtra?
And what the hell is Modiji doing in Delhi? Can't the idiots in Delhi see what is going on, and do something about Maharashtra. How can we let one state just kill us like this with incompetence?
... Notice that, even with a 1000 over my expectation for MAH today, we are still only hitting about +28K. All that Maharashtra will do is to delay the inflection point that is coming. And it is still all about Thane and Pune. How much more can they grow? (The rest of MAH is growing but not so badly). What I was talking about was generally on the basis of the city areas left, and I still feel what I said above is going to happen. Maybe a week later possibly. Maharashtra came and screwed up my happiness this week. They may do that next week too. Otherwise, we were looking at reaching an inflection point within 1 to 2 weeks... Not sure how long Maharashtra can keep adding 1000-1500 extra to their previous week's peak, every week. I suspect not for long, even with all the bad testing. I mean, a lot of people are infected in western Maharashtra urban areas now, so it just has to flatten in MAH soon.
... Lab count update: +14 to +1194... Good.