Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

[rajitghosh]

Add me in the list of covid positives. Suddenly had high fever day before with shivering the way you get malaria. Got both malaria and covid tested. Malaria negative covid positive.

All recovered, Rajit? I see that you posted once a couple of days ago in the cricket thread. So I hope everything is fine.

No more fever but still have a cold and lost taste and smell. On the way to recovery.

[sameerph]

Wish you a speedy recovery, Rajit.

[suresh]

@rajit Good to hear that you are recovering. Take care.

[jayakris]

Looks like it was a little worse than in many patients, but good to hear that it is going away, Rajit.

[jayakris]

We did really well on vaccinations today (Monday)... 446,646... Cumulative total: 6,259,008. The 447K today is better than the 408K we did 2 weeks ago (much better than the pathetic 191K last Monday). Let us hope that some days will go up over 500K-600K for this week to get up to or over 3 million total.

We had +8.7K cases from about 642K tests at 1.36%... 3.7K in Kerala, 2.2 in Maharashtra and only 2.8K elsewhere. Kerala did a higher count on Sunday and managed a 6.8 positivity. The national 7-day average is about stagnant now, as KER has a slight rise per day due to higher testing. That is good. At least there is hope that KER will start dropping at some point sooner than later.

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ICMR Update: 202,587,752 total tests... Monday tests: 687,138... Lab count: 2373

[jayakris]

The January sero-surveys showed that KER is still pretty low in sero-prevalence though, so Im not even sure now if KER is yet ready to drop the numbers. The national average is about 21% of people exposed and having developed antibodies, but KER was still at only around 11% a few weeks ago... Back in August, when the nation had reached 6 or 7 percent, KER was hardly at 0.5%...

I think one issue in Kerala is that education/awareness and better hygiene are causing people to not be exposed enough to slowly build antibodies over time. Developing natural immunity from exposure to smaller viral loads has taken much longer, and so people are sitting ducks when they finally get hit by the virus from a contact or something.

That was just a theory from me, but it would help explain the strange phenomenon we have seen that some of the more educated and hygienic places like Kerala, Mumbai, Delhi, Poona, and Western countries got hit worse by the virus. A little bit of the Swedish scheme was needed in many of these places, to slowly get a lot of people exposed to small viral loads and develop some immunity. Maybe? What do you all think?

[arjun2761]

Add me in the list of covid positives. Suddenly had high fever day before with shivering the way you get malaria. Got both malaria and covid tested. Malaria negative covid positive.

All recovered, Rajit? I see that you posted once a couple of days ago in the cricket thread. So I hope everything is fine.

No more fever but still have a cold and lost taste and smell. On the way to recovery.

Yes, wish quick and full recovery!

I have a cousin that has otherwise fully recovered several months ago but hasn't regained his sense of smell yet. Hope that it is something that comes back in time...

[jayakris]

^^^ Yes., it does seem to take some time for the sense of smell/taste to return, but they do return, which is the good news... This link gives some details - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00055-6

For most people, smell, taste and chemesthesis recover within weeks. In a study published last July, 72% of people with COVID-19 who had olfactory dysfunction reported that they recovered their sense of smell after a month, as did 84% of people with taste dysfunction. Claire Hopkins, an ear, nose and throat consultant at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in London, and her colleagues similarly observed a speedy return of the senses: they followed 202 patients for a month, and found that 49% reported complete recovery over that time, and a further 41% reported an improvement.

Hope it comes back quickly for you, Rajit. Must be a real pain not to have taste/smell...

[jayakris]

+10.7K cases from 792K tests at 1.36% on Tuesday... Out of that, 5.5K is from Kerala, 2.5K from MAH and 3K from elsewhere. The 7-day average is stagnant at 11.5K for about 4 days now. Kerala needs to drop. But when will that happen??

We did 266K vaccinations by 6 pm Tuesday, which may be the highest we have seen so far by evening. Let's see where the final tally is. [EDIT: Not as much as I hope for, after 6 pm... It was 352,553 final count, for 6,611,561 cumulative total].

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ICMR Update: 203,324,655 total tests... Tuesday tests: 736,903

[jayakris]

We had +12.6K cases today, a little bit less than last Wednesday's 12.9K but from 40K more tests than last Wednesday... About 842K tests and 1.496% today. The 7-day average dropped a teeny bit but has essentially been flat for 5 days now. KER had 6K, Maharashtra had 3.5K and the rest of the nation had 3.1K.

Kerala had 6.3K from 60K tests last Wednesday but 6K from 80K tests today, so things are getting better there.

Looks like an okay day, nothing great, on the vaccination front. 215,133 by 6 pm for 6.83M total... Would be nice if we got to 7M by late evening. [EDIT: We did go past 7M by the end of day. A good count of 405,349, for 7,017,114 total]

As of midweek (Sun thru Wednesday), this week has been good. Two weeks ago, we did 774K vaccinations by mid week, and last week we did 705K, but this week we have done 1241K so far, so it is a significant jump in the rate. Hope it stays high for the next 3 days. Let's have 2.5 to 3 million this week.

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ICMR Update: 204,023,840 total tests... Wednesday tests: 699,185... Lab count: 2376

[jayakris]

Looks like vaccinations have sped up... 413,752 by 7 pm today (Thursday). Will we hit 600K today? About 7.4M done. [EDIT: No huge flourish at the end, as we finished with 487,896 today for a cumulative total of 7,505,010]

We had +12K cases today, from about 837K tests at 1.43% positivity... Still testing at a pretty high rate, which is good to see. For good news, Maharashtra found another 2465 names who were duplicated in their excel spreadsheets! That was taken off, so our total went up only by 9.5K today. The active case count also reduced by that much. Now, there are only 133K active patients in India (and 64K are in Kerala, with 10K in the Ernakulam/Kochi district; 30K in Maharashtra). KER had a slight drop to 5.8K today, MAH went up a bit to 3.3K and the rest of the country also went up a little bit to 3.4K... The seven day average dipped a tiny bit to 11.4K

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ICMR Update: 204,789,784 total tests... Thursday tests: 765,944

[Atithee]

The New York Times
The Newest Diplomatic Currency: COVID-19 Vaccines
Mujib Mashal and Vivian Yee
Thu, February 11, 2021, 11:43 AM

Interesting take on vaccine diplomacy by India.

https://news.yahoo.com/newest-diplomati ... 16540.html

[jayakris]

I ended up finding this news yesterday about the young president of little Dominica taking a chance on a prayer and writing to PM Modi for vaccines in late January. He didn't expect to get 70K doses so fast (enough to do half of the caribean island's population or whatever). They got their consignment yesterday. http://news.gov.dm/news/5180-covid-19-v ... n-dominica

He tweeted this (you can see the tricolor on the boxes. The president himself was there to unload it off the plane, as he was over the moon!)


They are sharing some of it with Barbados, whose PM also had written to Modiji.
https://www.caribbeannationalweekly.com ... n-islands/

Meanwhile, Rihanna can go take a hike as her home country gets our vaccine.
India donates vaccines to Rihanna’s home country Barbados, a week after she fanned anti-India propaganda over farm laws

This surprised me, as Mexico is actually a vaccine producer. India is sending a million doses even to Mexico.
Mexico to receive 1 million doses of India-made Covid vaccine

Yep, India is picking up a lot of goodwill with vaccine diplomacy. We are probably the only country who makes many times as many vaccine doses a day (some 2.5 million doses made by SII itself every day; that's amazing) than we are able to use with out vaccination capacity right now. That may change later, but for now, we can afford to do this.

[Atithee]

Who needs friends when you have ‘Chattis’ (36) enemies?

Indian state rejects Bharat Biotech vaccine approved without efficacy data

[jayakris]

Who needs friends when you have ‘Chattis’ (36) enemies?
Indian state rejects Bharat Biotech vaccine approved without efficacy data

Actually I am not too bothered by Chhattisgarh doing this kind of mischief. Opposition-ruled states often do these political stunts in India... Some of it is even useful, just to keep the ruling party in check. Par for the course in democracy.

But I have a huge problem with the posterior orifice scribes in India that wait for anything negative, to send out some drivel to Reuters, New York Times, etc. If they can find even a small negative item to make India look bad, they pounce on it - like in the above article. If it's anything good, of course, they avoid even mentioning it. It is totally out of hand these days, because of the venom these leftist scribes (which seemingly all of them who write for world press are) keep against PM Modi. Unbelievable anti-India sentiment in the articles seen abroad, mostly all written by so-called "Indians" who consider themselves the guardians of Indian democracy that is supposedly "getting decimated by the right-wing extremist Hindu government" run by "the biggest despotic autocrat in the world", Modi.

These days the first thing I do is to check if a foreign-press or news agency article's writer is a non-Indian by any chance. They are the only ones who write reasonable things. If it is an Indian name, it is nearly 100% sure that any article in the world press with "India" in it will be bashing our country. Unfortunately, the number of foreign observers and writers in India are far fewer now than before. So it is only negative these days, thanks to our fellow countrymen. I don't remember any time when it was this bad.