Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

[jayakris]

Where is my favorite health minister from Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma? No further tweet at night? Gone to sleep? I hope... Don't want to see the numbers go up more.

By the way, he is none other than the president of the Badminton Association of India. He has been doing a great job in Assam all along, on Covid-19. I haven't followed BAI politics much to know how good he is in his badminton politics. He is a hard worker for sure!

Update: +86 in BIH for a 233 in the day.
Update: +11 to 382 in UP (the minister's number 370 earlier was not final)
Update: +90 in JH to 185 today

+10353 with TPR and maybe +ASM to come.

... and just when I was going to finalize things, calling it a day, here comes Mr. Sarma with a +76 inn ASM for +230 in the day.

+10429 and that is a final! (Like today, any +TPR will go to tomorrow's count)

[jayakris]

+10,429 to 246,531 with a daily growth of 4.42% and a doubling period of 16.1 days.
Deaths: +297 to 6,946 ... Overall death rate is 2.82%
Recoveries: +5,387 to 118,592 ... overall recovery rate is 48.1%

Today's Bad Areas:
+1321 (5.8%) to 23941 (+1146+95+80 to 20955+1718+1268) in Chennai/Chengalpattu/Thiruvallur, TN
+1320 (5.0%) to 27654 in Delhi, DEL
+835 (5.3%) to 16674 (+101+587+80+67 to 1386+12464+1861+963) in Palghar/Thane/Aurangabad/Jalgaon, MAH
+582 (7.7%) to 8192 in the mysterious state of the "Unassigned"
+378 (7.8%) to 5213 in the state of KAR
+355 (9.9%) to 3952 in the state of HAR
+230 (10.3%) to 2473 in th state of ASM
+216 (7.2%) to 3223 (+56+60+82+18 to 1382+1035+555+251) in Howr./N.Parg/Hoog./S.Parg ring around Kolkata, WB
+206 (6.3%) to 3496 in the state of TEL (+152 in Hyderabad itself)

No other contiguous areas had a growth rate above our national average today (4.42%) and 200+ new cases. The bad areas together had +5443 cases to take their total to 94,818 cases at a bad area growth rate of 6.09%... The rest of the country had +5468 cases to take their total to 151,713 at a good area growth rate of 3.73% ... Quite a bit more of bad areas today.

It was a so-so day. Not a totally unexpected kind of spike, but not a good day either. We are still keeping a +300 rise per day in daily additions during this week. It was showing some signs of perhaps dropping a bit, but not much yet. Maybe a teeny bit... Not getting worse anyway. Still a linear growth in daily additions.

[sameerph]

Looking at worldometers, both Pakistan and Bangladesh seem to be having real spikes now. Pakistan consistently having around 4000 cases a day now and Bangladesh is close to 3000. India is now #2 in new cases, Pakistan at #6 and Bangaladesh at #9. After being so low in the covid curve early on, Indian sub-continent is really getting to the top of the curve now. Begining to get worried considering the density of population in these countries but death rates are still much lower even in Pakistan and Bangaldesh I think like India. ( I have not confirmed).

Btw, there is a news going around that Dawood Ibrahim died in Karachi due to Covid. But, one will never know the truth as Pakistan still denies that he is on their land.

[Saniapower]

Looks like Saniapower hasn't appeared for 2 years since 2018 Wimbledon.

2020 Wimbledon stands cancelled due to pandemic

[Sin Hombre]

The real shame is the lack of testing.

Why have we not gotten to 200k tests yet?

We also need to install temperature scanners in all checkpoints at state entrances and railway stations and bus addas.

I had 10k as our peak a few weeks back, and it is now evident that won't be the case.

[prasen9]

China is now #136 in deaths/1M population. Their number is total BS.

India is #115. Not bad.

[depleter]

With all these humongous BLM protests out there with no signs of social distancing, are there any incidents of covid spread?

[jayakris]

With all these humongous BLM protests out there with no signs of social distancing, are there any incidents of covid spread?

Very good question. Tough to say because it coincided with states opening up. I just plotted the US daily cases for the last 10 weeks ending now (incl. sat June 6th). Since the peak around April 10th and riding the wave for a few days and adding 217.3K in the week ending on Apr 25th, here are the weekly drops in cases for 5 weeks in a row - 16.7K, 13.4K, 22.8K, 2.3K, 10.0K... Then, after those 5 weeks, it finally went up 4.9K this week. A rise in weekly cases. I looked at the states like NY which had the cases drop out, and I don't see a noticeable rise in the last few days to say that the protests caused a spike. What I do see is that this current rise is driven by large populous states like Texas and California that never had the daily cases drop much at all but have accelerated in the last 7 to 10 days.

So basically, a second wave has probably just started in the US, but that is probably not because of the Floyd protests, but because of the lockdown relaxations. One could also say that there are more patients in the incubation and symptomatic stages in TX and CA than in NY where the cases died out, and that the protests caused a spike, though. I doubt it.

Even if the protests have added some cases, I do not believe that this is because of the protestors' activities out in the crowd. It could very well be from persistent contact among small groups of people being out together for long periods in a day (walking together, eating together, shouting together - the last part being very problematic). There is a line of thought that any tear gas or pepper spray use may have caused some transmission because it makes people cough a lot, uncontrollably. But no clear evidence on anything, one way or the other.

[jayakris]

^^^ Continuing on the above analysis...

It is very interesting that the daily additions curves of the large states of TX and CA never really came down during the lockdown. They were mostly flat or rising at a very slow rate. But they are now possibly accelerating. Sort of like what happens in India too. The rates are contextual (the US doesn't have TJ, migrant, veggie market, state-border quarantines, and other weird case clusters that happens in India). India had slow rates but no flattening behavior at all.

Interestingly, Russia has shown the same pattern of a small rise and no drop in weekly cases in the last two weeks.

So, take heart. It is not just India. The large countries like USA and RUS that we thought were seeing a reduction in daily cases, and going the way of the piddly countries (GER, KOR, AUS, etc) are no longer showing it. They dropped some 10-15% from the peak, stayed around there and are rising now.

Not a single country among the most populous 10 countries (China excluded) has shown a drop in cases in the last week!

[jayakris]

The real shame is the lack of testing.
Why have we not gotten to 200k tests yet?

I wouldn't call it a real shame. Some shame

I think what happened is that the cities had no choice but to reassign their personnel to hospital matters. They had to take calculated risks, and not overdo the fever clinics and traced contacts' tests on a mass scale. They focused on dangerous slum areas in the bigger cities. Dharavi is absolutely a success story. That they kept the cases in 1 million population in probably the densest living quarters outside of Karachi in the world to under 2000 cases. Similar stories are there in places like Ramagunj in Jaipur, and the Pune slums. Of course, Agra etc. The problem Chennai has is that the poor areas are a little less dense, I think. Anyway, the testing has suffered because of that.

ICMR has been doing whatever they can in helping set up labs. Adding some 10-15 labs every day these days. But the cities need to generate samples. It is going very well in other states except the 3 large cities, and Ahmedabad/Indore/Hyderabad

But the really good news is that we still have very little pendency in India. Even Delhi has reduced it from 3 to 5 days to 1 or 2 days now. And the testing by all the states (except Telengana) on inter-state travelers has been top notch. The Northeast has been particularly good, along with all the southern states and thankfully UP, BIH, ODI too. In fact, UP's state-wide testing should receive an award of some sort, if you ask me. I have no concerns, if they all keep this up.

We also need to install temperature scanners in all checkpoints at state entrances and railway stations and bus addas.

We are temperature-scanning every train passenger everywhere! I am sure there are some Indian inefficiencies in all of this (apparently the migrants pull the chain and run out with the police running after them and all that!! ), but I see no reports of any place not doing temperature screening. Same at state borders on NH's and SH's, but I am sure there are porous areas where private travelers are going across more easily. A little less sure of bus stands. Not all of them have staff to screen everybody.

I had 10k as our peak a few weeks back, and it is now evident that won't be the case.

My guess was around 12K. Looks a little less likely after yesterday's count, but that can still happen. If so, it will be by around the 15th-20th.

[jayakris]

Looks like Saniapower hasn't appeared for 2 years since 2018 Wimbledon.

2020 Wimbledon stands cancelled due to pandemic

Bu it is good to see your disturbing split face profile picture again

[rajitghosh]

https://telanganatoday.com/pooled-testi ... ck-economy

On testing or rather the lack of it in Telngana

[jayakris]

ICMR update: Total tests: 4,666,386... Saturday tests: 142,069 ... So, let us hope for something less than 99,450 on Sunday for the positivity to stay under 7 percent. I think it will, tomorrow... I promise
Lab Number Update: +17 to 759 now... MAH now has 88 labs to do tests. What is the point, if they only do 12.5K tests though? They should do some 25K tests a day if they want to drop the numbers seriously.

Sunday numbers start with a +413 in the Unassigned category. They really need to do something about these cases. Or just drop them from the total if you don't know where they are. They have added numbers for 20 days now for 8605 total. Basically 2/3rds of the daily case rise has been just this. Either assign them to states, or take them out. Or count them as recovered, for lack of further info, after 2 weeks of keeping them in the list.

[jayakris]

https://telanganatoday.com/pooled-testi ... ck-economy
On testing or rather the lack of it in Telngana

Actually the article is on pool testing. The problem is that we don't seem to have a strategy on pool testing. The article actually gives some good suggestion on it. But getting state-level folks to get up to speed and do it, has been difficult. ICMR has not been too pro-active in pushing specific strategies. Testing in focused groups like at factories, schools, etc, is a good strategy.

It mentions Telangana. But we need to get Telangana to first do ANY testing and understand why they are testing, before we can ask them to think of pool testing strategies. Hyderabad had 150 cases today in a big spike. If we see 150+ again on Sunday, serious alarm bells need to start going off.

EDIT: Just saw this on UP's pool testing. "कल 5-5 सैंपल के 1084 पूल लगाए गए और 10-10 सैंपल के 127 पूल लगाए गए। 10 सैंपल वाले 127 में से 17 पूल पॉजिटिव पाए गए। 5 सैंपल वाले 128 पूल पॉजिटिव पाए गए :उत्तर प्रदेश के प्रमुख सचिव स्वास्थ्य अमित मोहन प्रसाद"

[jayakris]

No big rises in early going. +449 in WB, +239 KAR, +199 AP, +107 KER, +92 ASM, +38 UK, +191 HAR (early),+141 BIH (early), +75 PUN

Update: +1515 in TN. It is from 15671 tests. A little under 9.7% positivity. Chengalpattu sores, but is Chennai (+1156) beginning to hold?
Update: +3007 in MAH. A spike. Hits 3K once more after 2 weeks (+3041 on 24th May). +91 deaths, which is a reduction.
Data: It was +1420 to 48774 in Mumbai. Dharavi had only +16 again.
Observation: Maharashtra has gone past China's total-lie total!
Update: +480 in GUJ. As usual with 30 deaths. Are they ever going to drop it below 6% to under 4%?
Update: +433 in UP