Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

[jayakris]

How many tests in BLR?

Don't know, but newspapers seem to make general statements that the testing has not been much and one even said it has gone down, but I didn't see BLR testing numbers. My guess is that it is no more than 3000 to 5000 (at best). The state tests a lot, but BLR didn't need more than 2K earlier, with just 10 to 30 cases happening. I think they should have increased it at least 2 weeks earlier immediately after those ILI cases showed up and 11 deaths suddenly happened in the city. If they did that, we would've seen KAR test numbers going up by at least 5K by now. No indication of any of that. I think it is some 10K tests elsewhere and 4K max in the city. Hopefully it is 8K+6K and the positivity is not over 15 to 20%.

[Sin Hombre]

I don't see any news source for it but I heard that the KAR government seems to be claiming monsoon caused flu numbers are causing a (fake) spike in covid numbers.

[jayakris]

I don't see any news source for it but I heard that the KAR government seems to be claiming monsoon caused flu numbers are causing a (fake) spike in covid numbers.

They have no clue. Monsoon may be adding to cases everywhere, but a lot of the Bengaluru cases may be work-place spreads. I see some indications here and there. Need to check.

Meanwhile TEL just tested 3227 people and got 983 positives for 30.5% positivity. I cannot believe the idiots there. Kachara does what Kachara is.

[jayakris]

Looks like AP is getting a clue that the level of testing they do is unnecessary (and in my view counter-productive, as happened in TN already) - Asymptomatic cases keep officials on their toes
I was pretty sure of this, and was repeatedly saying it above, that AP is just picking up people who happen to have the virus in them. In fact, India has a lot of people who have the virus in them in low viral load, and they never become symptomatic (because the Indian immunity fights this virus). What is the big point? Just make sure that you do contact-tracing to make sure of where the symptomatic people are (or who might become symptomatic because of higher viral loads that got to them, as they are contacts of known symptomatic people), and to get the people who need hospital help quickly to the hospitals.

A lot of Indians who get the virus from a handrail on a bus or from a vegetable market basket, are not really going to fall sick. They really should not be counted at all, in my opinions as infected. But an RT-PCR will throw them up as a positive. Those whose bodies fight it and beat it, were never infected, in my view!

I am okay with a lot of testing, but if that overwhelms you and you lose track in contact-tracing, then it is really counter-productive. TN has allowed community transmission to start like this.

Glad to see that at least some people are getting a clue on this, in AP. Bottom line, if you are doing contact-tracing well, you will not be doing reckless testing. Keep the positivity at 3 percent or so (ie, find maximum 25 to 30 people per patient, but mostly all higher-risk contacts) and you avoid trouble. Like Kerala, Rajasthan etc does.

I mean, if you hear that one patient happened to go to a small local temple for 15 minutes, and you go test 200 people at the temple next day, you are overdoing it and wasting personnel resources. If your patient says he is a TV repair guy who was in 5 homes the previous 5 days, you test all 25 people in those homes. Because he was there long enough, and dropped a lot of virus in high density on the TV and the remote and all that. And you immediately quarantine those people.

Contact-tracing is an art, and you need to use common sense in it. You can easily get overwhelmed if you don't do it right.

[jayakris]

New problem city emerges. Guwahati. +195 today, as per Mr. Himanta Biswa Sarma. He needs to get on top of this rightaway. I think he already was, because the city went into a lockdown yesterday.

So,19,609 is the total for today. We are going at 500 extra a cases a day now, in daily additions.

[Sin Hombre]

15 highest rates of newly reported COVID-19 infections during the last week (new cases per million population):

French Guyana
Bahrain
Qatar
Oman
Chile
Armenia
Panama
Kuwait
Brazil
United States
Peru
Saudi Arabia
South Africa
Bolivia
Sweden


The entire middle east (outside of UAE) is a problem area.

[prasen9]

I don't see any news source for it but I heard that the KAR government seems to be claiming monsoon caused flu numbers are causing a (fake) spike in covid numbers.

They have no clue. Monsoon may be adding to cases everywhere, but a lot of the Bengaluru cases may be work-place spreads. I see some indications here and there. Need to check.

If they are just flu, then they will test negative and their positivity rate will decrease. Is that happening?

[jayakris]

If they are just flu, then they will test negative and their positivity rate will decrease. Is that happening?

ILI patients are anyway only a small fraction of the tests done. So no real discernible changes will be there in the positivity numbers. Some of these doctors just talk without any sense of the numbers, I guess.

[jayakris]

I had in my mind that I had made a prediction on the Hyderabad problem... So went back and found this in my Sunday predictions on June 7th. This was when I predicted a 335-345K for May 14th (which we hit just below, at 333K) and a 14-day prediction for June 21st at 420-440K (which we made at 427K). But we went over my current prediction for today at 525-535K by 4K... Hyderabad really hurt. Here is what I said on June 7th:

That is, again, unless there is a noticeable peak and flattening in daily additions. I just get this hunch from looking at the numbers that it *may* just be fixing to happen in the next 10 days or so. But that assumes that some city like Hyderabad does not start adding 30 extra cases a day, to go from 2000 to 5000 cases in the next 10 days. I don't think J&K is going to do that. They are testing quite well there. Telangana may still be a tinder box waiting to explode. I am not seeing any other place in such bad shape.

That was when our daily growth rate was showing a nicer drop, and I suspected that we might even get some sort of a first peak soon. But I guess I had a premonition on Hyderabad. I said "fixing to happen in 10 days or so". It even held up nicely for precisely 10 days, but the hopes vanished on the 11th day when Hyderabad showed a rise from +250 to +350. The HYD growth has been even worse than I thought though. They went from 3000 to 11000 between June 18th and 28th. And we went over my predictions for today by 4K too. Oh well.

And now Bengaluru joins the party, so any peak for us is still some weeks away. But once HYD and BLR stabilize to some daily addition of 1500-2000 or so and then stay in that vicinity with minor growth or with a Mumbai-like minor drop, we might get some national peak at some point... Probably not for the next 2-3 weeks It won't be a sharp peak, in any event. Maybe not even a peak in daily additions, but some good flattening of the daily additions graph. Hoping for that in late July. But 10 other cities like Madurai, Guwahati, Vijayawada, Lucknow and Cuttack may join the party by then and delay everything too! (Or Mumbai/Delhi/Chennai could start *really* dropping down to below 1000 levels. I need to see it to believe it).

[prasen9]

Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Pune, Vizag, Surat, Jaipur, Nagpur - many dense areas still left. You saw that the Northeast U.S. is going down but the South ad West are joining the party. That is the nature of this beast. And, I think if traveling is going on, local areas will have joint parties. So, I am not surprised seeing BLR and HYD going at it together. They possibly have people traveling among them now. So, Ahmedabad-Surat-Pune-Nagpur may be a cluster. Etc. And Vizag may join the HYD party soon. Kolkata-Cuttack-Guwahati will be another cluster. Maybe add in Jamshedpur-Ranchi-Durgapur-Asansol.

[jayakris]

Revisiting my predictions from 2 weeks ago (June 14), which was checked and revised in my post last Sunday (June 21):

We made it to the middle range of my predicted window, at 426.9K today. But I strongly felt that we might be much lower today, in my mind. Just wasn't confident, as I felt that a crazy rise that happened this week could still happen... Good that I was extra-cautious there...
My prediction for next Sunday? No choice but to raise my window from last week (510-530K) to a higher range, at 525-540K, for June 28th.
Adding a prediction for two weeks ahead... July 5th - I expect it in the 655K-685K range.

Even after revising it by 10K last week to 540K, we missed my prediction by 9K today. Wow. Some murderous week this was.
Need to raise next Sunday (Jul 5) estimate also. Revised 7-day prediction: 685-705K.
New 14-day (first) prediction for July 12th: 840K-870K

[jayakris]

Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Pune, Vizag, Surat, Jaipur, Nagpur - many dense areas still left. You saw that the Northeast U.S. is going down but the South ad West are joining the party. That is the nature of this beast. And, I think if traveling is going on, local areas will have joint parties. So, I am not surprised seeing BLR and HYD going at it together. They possibly have people traveling among them now. So, Ahmedabad-Surat-Pune-Nagpur may be a cluster. Etc. And Vizag may join the HYD party soon. Kolkata-Cuttack-Guwahati will be another cluster. Maybe add in Jamshedpur-Ranchi-Durgapur-Asansol.

It is all very much possible, but I don't think Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pune, Surat will come back with significant rises. Certainly not Jaipur. RAJ has that place under very tight control. The cities that grew once and got under control, generally have the work force ready to handle new rises in new areas. A second peak within a city under one municipal administration is much less probable, in my opinion.

[prasen9]

That is possibly true. So, the East remains as the next frontier for the despicable virus to go to. And then perhaps creep into the Northeast but those areas do not have much population.

Ahmedabad-Vadodara-Surat-Mumbai-Pune form a line. So, Nagpur is too far according to you? Do they have better connections with Indore, Bhopal? Then, perhaps Nagpur-Bhopal-Indore will be a cluster. How much is traveling across states allowed now?

[jayakris]

Ahmedabad-Vadodara-Surat-Mumbai-Pune form a line. So, Nagpur is too far according to you? Do they have better connections with Indore, Bhopal? Then, perhaps Nagpur-Bhopal-Indore will be a cluster. How much is traveling across states allowed now?

Bhopal and Indore both had their peaks and went down, so they kinda know how to take care of flares.

Nagpur has been testing and doing well so far, but it only takes 10 days of carelessness in contact-tracing to suddenly find that a cluster of 50 had started from a tea-seller or a gym instructor, and that it has already infected 300 (and you know only when 11 deaths of old folks in some families happen in one day, like in Bengaluru). Chance occurrences can totally escape the authorities even if they are not careless. Some of it is just luck or lack of it.

Though I said that places that handled it already may not get a big growth again, that is on the basis that there is already 5K or 10K cases in the city and another growth with 5 or 10K is improbable. But a 2K or 3K flare could happen quite easily somewhere.

Actually an issue now seems to be that authorities have no clue how to contain or prevent work-place spread. Most of them don't know anything more than "social distancing" as the slution. Nobody seems to be clued in on AC windflow inside buildings, or time-limits to use for workplace meetings, or about what items on a factory conveyor belt operation should be touched by successive employees and what needed to be "aerated" before the next person touches it. Vegetable sellers have still not been told to stop sitting on the floor, after all this time since Koyambedu. Even in offices, nobody should sit across the table and talk for more than 15 minutes with ANYBODY. Even your masks may have virus on it and you could get it when you fiddle with your mask or wipe sweat from under your nose/eyes. Have we seen operational advisories on these things? No. Epidemiologists don't get into these things. They are into macro-predictions. These things need to be figured out by contact-tracers who work with researchers.

So containment on workplace flares is a new thing. Indians don't know it. Americans don't know it either. Some like people in Germany, Korea,Hong Kong, Australia etc seem to be paying attention to such things. CDC in the USA has been disaster (also because the president does not let them do things with any direction or enthusiasm; nor does he help spread the good word from them).

Surat is actually having a work-place flare now (as are many towns and cities), and nobody seems to know what to do. This is in the diamond industry. Many diamond polishing workers are sick. No clue how it is happening. Maybe because of droplet spread as they blow on the diamonds after polishing? (Just a thought from me. Have anybody looked into it? I think not).

Puducherry had a big flare going at a mask factory, started by AC technicians from Madras who worked on their AC. Maybe opening all windows and letting fresh air in frequently is needed? How many offices and factories are doing it? Have anybody asked them to?

Waluj in Maharashtra has had 200 cases at the Bajaj auto-rickshaw and motor cycle plant. The districts authorities covered it up (looks very clear that they did), rather than find out what exactly happened on the factory floor, and tell others avoid the same mistakes elsewhere.

How do you prevent such things, even if you have contact tracing and residential containment zones? Need to learn a lot more about this virus, but only very few are trying to. At least in India, that is the situation. Actually the same everywhere.

So, all I said should be taken with a pinch of salt too. Crazy things are causing spread in India now. We need to get smarter, but I see no indication on that. We are good at staying scared and doing nothing though. So, all our metro rail systems are kept shut. We can't do that for ever. India is just not studying things properly, and just not preparing properly for the manpower resources needed to fight the virus.

[Sin Hombre]

The whole social distancing thing is/was such a wrong message to spread.

Stay away from indoors or places with recirculated air should have been it from the start (and have everyone wear masks if you need to be in such a location).