Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

[Atithee]

Jay, to put your mind somewhat at ease re: Maharashtra and Punjab. The last one is a clear indication that the central government is not asleep at the wheel and is concerned about exactly the same things we are. That shouldn’t be a surprise because there is no mystery around what needs to be done. But, it does tell you that the ministry is competent. What it can do to make things change on the ground is first in the people and second in state and local administrations’ hands.

Sharad Pawar Camping In Pune, Worst Affected District In Maharashtra By Covid
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/coronav ... ke-2291204

Increase contact-tracing in Western Maharashtra, says CM Uddhav Thackeray
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cit ... 922610.cms

Centre rushes high-level teams to Punjab, Chandigarh amid rapid surge in Covid cases
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/natio ... ses-137263

Five states, one UT with high COVID-19 caseload asked to scale up testing
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/natio ... ing-137304

[Atithee]

And we have +23,350 in Magarashtra.

Is Uddhav making Maharashtra great again?

[Sin Hombre]

No one cares is the reality of this.

After a 24% GDP contraction, I do not see it changing.

200k cases daily by end of Sep.

[rajitghosh]

Hospital issues may not crop up. A lot of cases being discovered are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic so there is no need for hospitalisation.
There is a rumour floating around in Maharashtra that the centre is giving Rs. 1.5 lakhs for every case discovered. I am not sure whether it is for all cases or hospitalised cases only. As a result there is a complaint that a lot of no symptoms cases are being declared positive to get the Government money. Having said that 300-400 people are still dying daily. So the truth probably lies somewhere in between

[Sin Hombre]

If 300-400 people are dying daily, the real number of cases in Mah alone is 100k/daily.

The CFR at this point is below 0.3%.

If people continue to behave like there is no pandemic, that number will go up and hospitals will crumble.

[jayakris]

Jay, to put your mind somewhat at ease re: Maharashtra and Punjab. The last one is a clear indication that the central government is not asleep at the wheel and is concerned about exactly the same things we are. That shouldn’t be a surprise because there is no mystery around what needs to be done. But, it does tell you that the ministry is competent. What it can do to make things change on the ground is first in the people and second in state and local administrations’ hands.

Thanks Atithee. Actually I had seen those reports (a couple in other articles), and sometimes they even worsen my concerns.

Hardly much talk of testing in clear terms in those articles. Like, the Center asked the state to do THIS many tests per day. Maybe the Centre's team is actually telling such things, but the CMs of the states in trouble never seems to mention it, and they keep staying in trouble. Till the state CM or top officials starts talking of the tests, that state does not escape trouble. I have noticed that everywhere. Almost all states where they talk about it, things are just fine.

Uddhav has NEVER said "we need to do this many tests". Never. And we have the problem because of that. Pinarayi Vijayan in Kerala also does not, though at least the press and intelligentsia of the state goes after him every now and then and it helps (and the current KER issue has come purely from poor testing). Same goes for Yedi in KAR, who has never shown a clue on this - but at least some people in Bengaluru seems to talk about it. Yogi and Nitish say "I need 150K next week" and it happens in UP and Bihar - and both states stay out of trouble. Kejriwal says he needs 40K per day and it at least goes up to 35K after 10 days. KCR said it at one point when he saw that they didn't have to lie and that the state was not doing that badly in disease monitoring to start with - and TEL has become a success story. Jagan talked about testing early, and the state screwed up with over-testing, and now he doesn't talk about it, and the they are not testing enough. Now is the time for AP to do a Bihar (not back in June!) and lack of testing keeps the numbers from dropping. Mamata at least mentions testing though she has no clue how many. Even that is enough because the officials in Bengal seem to be smart. I see at least officials in Gujarat, MP, etc, talking about wanting number of tests. Actually Chauhan does talk of it occasionally in MP. Generally, the states where I see there is some talk of testing, you see that there is no huge problem. The correlation to testing is so damn stark in the data. And that is no revelation... We all knew back in April about it!

True that the ICMR guys and the Centre are monitoring, but that is just not enough. You need PM Modi to get on the bully pulpit, if he has one, and go hard after some of these states with some specifics, but he is just not doing it. Definitely not in Maharashtra. Look at Sharad Pawar camping in Pune. For what? Does that whole article talk about containment or monitoring or testing? And I had seen Uddhav's statement on Western Maharashtra two days ago, and I laughed. Three weeks after we were worried about Kolhapur, it went out of the high-growth list, and was ready to come back (which it today, as I fully expected - now with 1600+ cases after 800s three weeks ago). It had all shifted to Nagpur,Nanded and Latur and Osmanabad earlier and finally Uddhav mentions western Maharashtra. I got a chuckle. I mean, the man has no clue. By then I was watching for North-west Maharashtra to start off. I knew it was coming, seeing the numbers at Dhule and Nadurbar. Today Nashik joined and we have 3000 cases there in bad growth. And in a couple of days Raigad might get back in the list, and then Thane back again. And then Akola, Jalna and Jalgaon will rage, as they have been gone from the bad list for a while. Maybe Mumbai back again with 3000 or 40000 cases in 10 days time from now. They are all testing in the 15 to 35% range of positivity. Obviously there is NO control of the spread, at all.

It is all going to happen. Things we all know can happen, DOES happen, invariably. Because there are a lot of people who are yet to be infected in India. Whole lot. Like 997 out of 1000 people are yet to be infected!!! There is no miracle happening and it is not stopping.

You need to test and tell a lot more people that they are asymptomatically positive for this thing to slow this down. There is no way people will act with some discipline (at least with their family/friend contacts) till a whole lot more of them are told they are positive and the word spreads.

We do not want to go to 10K infections per million, which we are going to reach by end of October, at this rate. Maybe 15K per million by January and 25K per million sometime in February by when we may actually be doing serious vaccinations.

Half a million people will be dead by then in India. We cannot let this disease keep on spreading to the uninfected, unchecked. We need a peak and a drop to at least half the daily additions in the next month or two. Need to keep the 4 million cases from going to 30 million by Feb. It should go only to may be 10 million and no more than 150K deaths. That is important. It is no time for officials to give up.

The success of good-testing states like Bihar is so visible in the death numbers. The need for quick AG tests in large numbers is very clear, but nobody seems to point out any of this, even while casual observers who waste time on this like me can see it. It is not even that complicated a story to convey to these CMs, because they work with more complicated equations in politics all the time. But nobody is able to do that with some of these really clueless CMs.

[jaydeep]

Another update,

Health survey to screen all homes from September 15 to October 25 in Maharashtra

[jayakris]

Another update,
Health survey to screen all homes from September 15 to October 25 in Maharashtra

More bullshit from Rajesh Tope. Yeah right. Pune does 1:12 contact tracing. 1 to 5 would be nice. They never did even that. And he wants them to do 1 to 20. And my uncle would be my aunt if he grew long hair.

And this survey is supposedly to help authorities identify ILI patients. Take your bullcrap and dump it, you dolt. People know when they have ILI symptoms. And if it is Covid, they are as little as 3 days away from death. And you don't even have time to get them an RT-PCR test result before they die. Have you taken a look at how many people die like that in Maharashtra, you knucklehead?

STILL not talking about plain testing, so more asymptomatic patients can know that they are infected. And you are going to wait another 9 days to start this house survey. Is there any sense of urgency in you, lowlife? Like we believe you are going to do it, anyway. And what is the point if you are not going to test anybody? Telling people whom to vote for, or what?

Damnit, just order 2 million AG kits, make them available at 150K a day (in 4 days time if you can), and then get the hell out of the way. Doctors and people will take care of this. Take your bullshit and shove it. Yeah I am mad. For these kinds of dimwits letting people die like they are.

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ICMR Update: 49,551,507 total tests... Sunday tests: 720,362. The usual drop. Some 850K tests may be reported by the states tomorrow. Would be nice to get under 70K to 75K tomorrow, but I doubt it. Lab count: 1655

[jayakris]

Revisiting my predictions from 2 weeks ago (Aug 23), which was checked and revised in my post last Sunday (Aug 30):

New 14-day (first) prediction for Sunday, Sep 6, is 4.050 to 4.100M

The revised prediction for next Sunday, Sept 6, is 4.100 to 4.130M
New 14-day prediction for Sunday, Sep 13 is 4.750M to 4.800M

This week had much worse growth than I expected, and we badly overshot my predictions, at 4.202M
Raising my predictions for next Sunday, Sep 13, to 4.850M to 4.880M
New 14-day prediction for Sunday, Sep 20 is 5.550M to 5.600M

[jayakris]

So, Maharashtra started a 2-day Monsoon assembly session. Utter chaos, apparently. Everybody was required to get Covid tests (legislators, bureaucrats, staff and journalists) to enter the building. 2115 samples were tested and 58 turned positive! That is 2.7% infected. One in 35. Terrible. I know these people are more prone to get infected, as they all deal with a lot more people than normal public. But if you extend that rate to 114M people in Maharashtra, you would get 3 million infections. I am going to assume about half of it for the genral public. So, probably 1.5 million infections. And they have caught 1 million of it so far through testing.

What does it all mean? I don't know. It is just a terrible situation of disease spread in Maharashtra. That is all.

As of 11 pm, Maharashtra has still not released the number for today. 3-hour delay. What's up? We are at 59K with MAH to come.

And here they come. +16K. Fine. But 423 deaths! My God, what is going on there in Maharashtra? can you blame me for yelling at everybody? Does anybody care? Modi, Uddhav, Fadnavis, S.Pawar?

EDIT: It was 28% positivity in the state today. Take Mumbai (18.9%) out, and it is a glorious 30.0% in Maharashtra. How bad can it get?

[jayakris]

ICMR Update: 49,551,507 total tests... Sunday tests: 720,362. The usual drop. Some 850K tests may be reported by the states tomorrow. Would be nice to get under 70K to 75K tomorrow, but I doubt it.

The states reported about 958K tests today, and we got 75K cases for a 7.8% positivity. Basically the same as what we have lately had in the last 4-5 days.

Time to raise testing yet again. Need to see 1.3 to 1.4 million tests/day later this week, or our positivity will keep going up. It has inched up from around 7.3 to 7.8% The last 4-5 days.

Several states need to raise their testing to twice what they are doing. Chhattisgarh is the worst right now and they are getting over 15% positivity suddenly, as Covid is raging there. They need to add almost three times as many tests and go up from 15K to 45K easily. Odisha is testing only hal the number too (even with 95% Antigen tests!) .... Rajasthan, Kerala, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh etc need to get their act together quickly too, or we will see serious second/third waves in those places, and that has started off. As for the known big culprits, MAH, KAR, AP, I guess there is no point talking about it. They are not going to do anything.

Then there is the issue of raising RT-PCR tests. Bihar is the worst right now. Doing 140K AG tests and just 10K RT-PCR is not going to keep the numbers down for too long. UP and Gujarat are also doing way too many AG tests but not doing enough RT-PCR. Odisha also.

Too many issues right now on testing. That means, we shouldn't expect a real peak or drop that soon. Hope we will see it in October/November?

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ICMR update: 50,650,128 total... Monday Sep 7 tests: 1,098,621

[jayakris]

No improvement in some troubled states today. Kerala keeps on frigging up on testing. Did just 37K and got +3K on 8% today (Tuesday).... Odisha did 41K and got +3.5K at 8.5%... These are two states that used to test well in the 3 to 5 percent range all along. They are now hellbent on screwing up. EDIT: Add Haryana to this list. They reported 25K on Sunday, 21K yesterday and now 17K today. For +2.3K and 13.4%... And THEY used to test well too. This is a chronic problem. States that used to do well are giving up just when they have flat numbers and can actually shut the door on the virus if they would simply test (AG or PCR, whatever!)

And I see that the morning update from Maharashtra was just 80K tests yesterday. Down from 93K last week. Jesus Christ! Will see if it is any better in the night update. But this is becoming incredibly serious. Maharashtra needs to do AG testing. WTF are they doing? The state has time to waste, fighting some actress. The Centre has time to provide that actress Y level security too. 400+ people dying a day is not an issue. One actress' personal security is so important (and I like Kangana Renaut, but that is not the point).

TN is down into the 5600s today. At least some good news.

[jayakris]

We had +89.7K today. The surprise was Jharkhand suddenly raising their testing from around 35K to 103K. Whoa. They started doing a UP/Bihar too. Fantastic. They got a +2700 in the state for 3.6% positivity, but that is the way to do it. Get the peoplle in early. And if you are using AG tests, you better be getting under 4 or 5 percent positivity.

So we had 1207K tests today for 89.7K cases, and our positivity was 7.45% today, down from the 7.8% in the recent days.

Bihar, UP, Assam, Jharkhand have all shown that it is no big deal to start doing massive numbers of tests, if you want to. When the hell will Maharashtra do it? I have been waiting for them to add even 20 or 25K extra tests one fine day (and they need to add 100K per day, minimum). Waiting for 4 months now, and they still do 80K tests and get 25% positivity. Argh.

[suresh]

I wish states that are doing huge numbers of AG tests also start increasing the number RT-PCR tests. Low positivity on AG tests can be misleading. As Jay suggests that good numbers are 4-5% for AG tests while for RT-PCR it is around 8-9 or even under 10%.

[jayakris]

I wish states that are doing huge numbers of AG tests also start increasing the number RT-PCR tests. Low positivity on AG tests can be misleading. As Jay suggests that good numbers are 4-5% for AG tests while for RT-PCR it is around 8-9 or even under 10%.

Yeah it is all a mess. I wish ICMR would just give some straight and clear guidelines on these things. They are just too passive (as is the Central Government itself) in going after the states. Just tell them, "do this!". The states may not obey, but at least they will know what they are not doing, and maybe the others like press and other politicians will have something to put pressure on the states.
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ICMR update: 51,804,677 total tests. Tuesday tests: 1,154,549... I guess we will see somewhere around 1.2M tests tomorrow too. Lab Count: +23 to 1678... That's a good number of labs added today.