Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

[prasen9]

Thanks, suresh. Yes, the article acknowledges that it will be faster. The centre will put in more people to help out.

[rajitghosh]

India has crossed 4000 deaths. While we may be nowhere near USA or Europe 4000 doesn't give a good feeling

[sameerph]

And we also move ahead of Iran in top 10 in number of cases. Not the stats where i wanted India in top 10.

[jayakris]

Yeah, but we have done very well in delaying all this so much, so in the end, it is generally job well done.

Update: UP with a +250, so no huge problems going on there, still. Just what good testing does. Other things were taken care of already (Agra etc) and now it is just quarantining these migrants.

Final number seems to be +7111 to 138,536... About 3-4K more than I expected about 3 weeks ago when were in the 30K range. But that is actually the unexpected +2.5K from the ether state that I assume is Indian military. The rest is all going as pr schedule

[jayakris]

+7,111 to 1,38,536 today... The growth rate is 5.41% and the doubling period is 13.2 days.

Deaths: +156. Today's daily rate against new cases: 2.19%... With 4024 total, the overall death rate dropped again to 2.90%

Recoveries: 3283 to 57,692... Recoveries-to-new: 32-to-68 ... Overall recovery rate: 41.6%

The daily growth rate is actually going up a teeny bit, rather than drop, for the last few days. Not very good, but nothing is exploding at above 6 or 7 percent to worry too much either. How fast it will drop to 3 or 4 percent will tell us if or when we may get a true flattening of the curve, but first the daily addition numbers to start leveling off and drop. That is not happening, and there is absolutely no sign of it yet. The daily additions are actually going up at a noticeably faster rate now than a week ago, because of lockdown relaxations. We will just have to wait, but it is pretty clear that we will not get a peak for new case numbers till at least mid June, the way it is looking now. It could be much much later for all we know.

No indications at all in the data to say anything about a peak. All we can say is nothing looks catastrophic like it looked in many countries during the growth phase. We are having a rather unique "Indian style" slower growth, for ever. We are the slow elephant in the room anyway!

Bad Areas:
+2412 (6.7%) to 38585 (+1725+495+126+66 to 30542+6625+742+676) in Mumbai/Thane/Raigad/Palgar, MAH
+654 (6.0%) to 11638 (+587+46+21 to 10582+776+280) in Chennai/Chengal./Kancheep., TN
+513 (7.8%) to 7056 (+335+34+75+13+6+30 to 5682+601+279+155+80+259) in Pune/Solap./Satara/Ratna./Sangli/Kolhap., MAH
+439 (23%) to 2338 in the mysterious state of the "Unassigned"
+208 (6.0%) to 3667 in WB
+180 (7.5%) to 2574 in BIH

No other contiguous areas had a growth rate above our national average today (5.41%) and 150+ new cases. The above areas together had +4406 cases to take their total to 65,858 at a bad area growth rate of 7.17%... The rest of the country had 2705 cases to take their total to 72,678 at a good area growth rate of 3.87%.

[jayakris]

Something to think about: Have we actually reached a peak in cases outside of Maharashtra and the military?

Here are the numbers over the latest 20 days outside of MAH and "ether": 1987, 2369, 2078, 2250, 2010, 2368, 2362, 2536, 2231, 2389, 2232, 3188, 2702, 2623, 3262, 3277,3371, 3379, 3776, 3631 ....

The last week's numbers looks like a peak to me, or like nearing a peak. What do you all think? ... I guess I need another 3-4 days to confirm it.

[EDIT: Actually, plotting the whole series of numbers for a longer period, I'm unsure if we can say if we are at a peak]

[shibi]

Yeah, but we have done very well in delaying all this so much, so in the end, it is generally job well done.

We did well in delaying the spread by the lockdown, right. But it's good only if a treatment/ vaccine is found in the interim or shortly after. If not, we probably will have to go a similar route of Europe & America, which will have a devastating effect coming after such a long lockdown. When many countries are back to almost normal, India may still be suffering.

[jayakris]

We did well in delaying the spread by the lockdown, right. But it's good only if a treatment/ vaccine is found in the interim or shortly after. If not, we probably will have to go a similar route of Europe & America, which will have a devastating effect coming after such a long lockdown. When many countries are back to almost normal, India may still be suffering.

Not really. Not at all, actually. The countries that think they are back to normal are basically like Kerala. Just a matter of time when travel will cause all those countries to see their case totals continue to grow, and they are not set up all that much better (probably worse than us) in containment areas within the country and all that. Many of them really have no clue where to start doing that, and people in those countries who drive a lot or take trains won't agree to quarantining at state or district/county borders like Indians are agreeing to undergo without rioting. Those countries will grow at worse rates now, than us. No reason to say that we will suffer more.

As for vaccine ... It ain't happening for several months, like next summer before anybody will vaccinate even 10% of their population. This will go on, and the numbers and hospital issues they will all face will be based on how well any country does quarantining, airport screening, road travel restrictions etc. We are quite a bit ahead of all these countries because of everything we did during this period. But, we may take the foot off the pedal and everybody may go "chalta hai" in another couple of months and we could be in trouble.

But one thing that some countries like the US are ahead on, is availability of testing for the general public, set up by private labs. Irvine, the city that I live in, announced this week that ALL residents can set appointments and get tested, and a lot of test locations have come up. India needs to open it up and let the private labs just do a lot of tests. At least those who can pay the money should be able to get tested. What we are doing is to set prices, so as to make sure the poor not get an unfair shake. But that can't go on for ever. The large middle class in India who can afford this test should be allowed to get tested and go to a hospital early when they feel they may have Covid-19. The test kits and all that is not a big problem because Indian companies can make it in massive numbers and they have been doing that. Most of these can be less-accurate antibody tests, but that is okay.

(Travel within the countries everywhere will pretty soon need testing and "Covid certificates" that are issued quickly, like within 2 hours)

[jayakris]

Revisting my predictions from over 4 weeks ago at around 20K... Last prediction was 9 days ago on May 15th..

Revisiting my predictions from over 3 weeks ago on Apr 23rd when we were at around 20K, and a couple of earlier look-backs....

My 3-week April 23rd predictions (which I had looked back at, in two posts here, a week ago on May 3rd) are still holding up quite well.

My summary April 23rd summary: "If we are close to 200K on May 15th, watch out. Hell would've already broken loose everywhere. In 3 weeks time. I hope that won't be the case. Hopefully we will only see 40% of such numbers on May 15th for an 80K total."
I don't think we are going in those troublesome directions. Basically doing a tad bit better than I thought. I am still sticking to 65K, or may raise it to 70K max for May 10th. Not more than 100K on May 15th. Probably 85K-90K. I know, I shouldn't predict what might happen after the next week or so.

I had said 45K for May 3rd (and we were at 46K), and 65K for May 10th (we are at 67K today). My existing 12-day advance prediction is for about 85K-90K for May 15th. With 5 days to go, my guess is still under 90K for May 15th.
...
I am hoping for something under 100K by next Sunday, May 17th. I will make a not-so-confident prediction of 140K to 145K by May 24th, and about 190K to 210K for May 31st.

We hit the 85-90K prediction for today, closer to 85K. We won't be much above 95K on Sunday May 17th. We are going pretty close to my most optimistic scenarios above, despite all the mess going on in Mumbai, and despite the unforeseen Koyambedu flare-up. That is nice!

We hit the May15th total of 100K max at 96.7K, and did noticeably better than the 9-day advance prediction of 145K with the 138.5K today (May24). My next prediction is 195-200K for May 31st and 265-270K for June 7th. Still not predicting a peak on daily additions but a slight slowing of its rise. Expecting active cases (now 76.8K) to not double till about June 15th.

[prasen9]

I actually find the death numbers to be more accurate. More specifically, excess mortality. But, I suppose for now, we have to do with death numbers. The positive numbers are apples and oranges that will go up or down between how much testing we are doing.

[jayakris]

I actually find the death numbers to be more accurate. More specifically, excess mortality. But, I suppose for now, we have to do with death numbers. The positive numbers are apples and oranges that will go up or down between how much testing we are doing.

I believe excess mortality numbers are tough to find for India. I read that somewhere. Because we don't have a national "dashboard" on deaths.

And it seems the deaths in India are way fewer in the last 2 months anyway, due to the lockdown. So, there is no way excess mortality due to Covid can be found out. Because the baseline cannot be established. Here is an HT article on it - Drop in number of fatalities as civic bodies struggle to update data due to Covid-19 lockdown -- "Mumbai reported 17.93 per cent lesser deaths in April 2020, Chandigarh 15.5 per cent, Jaipur 73 per cent and Indore 78 per cent as compared to April last year, according to the registrars of deaths and births in these cities. April 2020 also recorded lesser deaths in comparison to the first three months of this year in these cities".

Plus, most cities haven't had officials update their numbers anyway. Some say they will compile it only once a year at the deadlines, and so we may not know for a long time!

[prasen9]

Huh! We have excess immortality! People are not going on our dangerous roads and thus living longer. What a thing to happen. Yes, excess mortality numbers will come out later. Or someone will do some study (with their biases and all). Not having that, the number of covid-deaths is a better measure imho. Jakarta is doing a fine job, I say of reporting only 14% of their COVID deaths The other end is Belgium, which reported 102% of its excess mortality as covid deatha. Which means that Belgium has marked live people dead (not really, this can happen because of a small variation due to randomness from year to year).

[Sin Hombre]

Something to think about: Have we actually reached a peak in cases outside of Maharashtra and the military?

Here are the numbers over the latest 20 days outside of MAH and "ether": 1987, 2369, 2078, 2250, 2010, 2368, 2362, 2536, 2231, 2389, 2232, 3188, 2702, 2623, 3262, 3277,3371, 3379, 3776, 3631 ....

The last week's numbers looks like a peak to me, or like nearing a peak. What do you all think? ... I guess I need another 3-4 days to confirm it.

Use a 7-day moving average to compensate for weekend reporting issues and we can call it a peak when we see a drop on that.

Agree with prasen re: excess mortality but it is fairly likely that India doesn't have any. Lower levels of pollution and lower traffic on the road are both significant positives.


Jay, on a different note, covid has already fallen below pandemic levels in UK and the piddly island was a country that reacted late and badly
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus- ... g-11993739

[suresh]

Yesterday, we were fourth in the number of daily new cases behind USA, Brazil and Russia. We just overtook Iran to take 10th place in the total number of cases.

[jayakris]

ICMR update: Total tests: 3,033,591 ... Tests in the latest 24 hours: 90,170

That is a weird drop, from 115K to 90K... Things are never too smooth in India on numbers. But we crossed 3 million tests.