Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

[Sin Hombre]

100% praying for India (and the rest of the world).

Unfortunately too many idiots around like the British tourist who was symptomatic and tried to escape
https://scroll.in/latest/956235/coronav ... -offloaded

or, not quarantining themselves after returning
https://scroll.in/latest/956221/covid-1 ... government


The good thing is the Indian media will name and shame people like these, sometimes maybe even often incorrectly, but desperate times call for desperate measures. This is not a time for full privacy rights.

[Sin Hombre]

jay looks like the jump in Malaysia came from after a large mosque gathering
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... rong-event

Another event that should not have happened, but at least on an optimistic note, it wasn't communal transmission in warm weather.

[jayakris]

Hats off to the Kerala police for tracking down the Brit just in the nick of time. Yeah, we can question the "personal rights" aspect of all this. I say to hell with it. Desperate times do call for desperate measures. Name and shame them all.

Thanks for the detail on the Malaysia mosque thing. The world should have started social distancing on Feb 25th when one prayer meeting in a cult church caused the Daegu breakout in S.Korea. Mindboggling that we are still having mosques, churches and temple gatherings. The Clueless in Chief called for a national prayer day today - the most irresponsible and useless thing that I could imagine. Praying and chanting is the best way to spread the virus out of people's mouths into others' noses.

[Sabarimala asked devotees not to come for the mid-month darsans and people stopped going to other big temples like Guruvayoor too. Totally empty temples, seeing some great pictures that we would never imagine was possible in paces like Guruvayoor! But Tirupati is still open and having crowds, I think. They should close all temples, mosques and churches immediately in India. EDIT - Tirupati is going to token-only darsan and no queuing

[jayakris]

The Malaysia case makes me wonder about yet another aspect. The breakout in Iran and Daegu started from mosque and church folks. Not sure if something church-related happened in Italy too. Sitting down and praying together is a common denominator, probably. Sitting for long enough period next to somebody who may be sending droplets out is asking for trouble. The Hindus do not really do much sitting down prayer at temples, so that might save a few people. When you are walking around in a crowded area, you only come for short periods to a place where a positive patient has shed virus, though you may pass through more such virus hot-spots (lesser chance to get infected), as opposed to sitting within 4-5 feet of a patient for an hour or more like in Churches and mosques. Worse still, if people are prostrating and dropping virus right from the mouth to the floor. Again much less among Hindus compared to Muslims, and Christians don't prostrate at chruches (except in cults like the one in Daegu who have some rituals of that kind, I think).

Temples should temporarily outlaw prostrating. In mosques, they do that and if it is on carpet, again you are asking for trouble.

A religious ritual angle in this? I may be wrong, but it is yet another thing I had wondered about.

By the way, the local Hindu Malayalee group that I am in, was supposed to have a monthly prayer meeting and I managed to get them to cancel it. We sit down and sing bhajans, and I got a doctor to kick up a ruckus saying it could be a big problem. The group had never cancelled a monthly bhajan in 30 years and many were miffed at us. Now they all understand what we were saying 10 days ago!

[sameerph]

I could even pardon people for not taking it that seriously when it was primarily only in China. But TWO days after the Korea breakout started in Daegu on February 20th and 300-400 were stricken in a couple of days, the world should have known to immediately start airport screening and all kinds of things. They all waited for an extra 10 to 14 days, and THAT was unpardonable. I guess people didn't know how advanced S. Korea is in their healthcare and how efficient the country generally is. The thinking should've been, "if this is happening from one church patient in S. Korea of all places, we are in trouble". Instead the westerners took it as a problem in some unhealthy snake- and dog-eating third world place or something.

Maybe because I follow Korea very closely, I knew immediately by March 20th, and I told my wife that we were canceling a trip planned for April 2nd week to Korea.

Korea has seen a remarkable drop in cases in last few days and China too. Are the numbers deliberately suppressed there ? ( possible in case of China in particular ) or they are really doing something right to bring down the numbers or has the phase in virus spread passed there if something like this happens in case if this virus.

[Sin Hombre]

Korea has certainly got it under control, and they should have been the template for the rest of the world - aggressive testing, contact tracing and quarantining.

China's real number of cases is likely significantly higher (at least 10x imo) but they also have the transmission under control. Question with China though is what happens when they lift the lockdowns - will we see a spike in transmission rates again since the population at large does not have herd immunity.

[jayakris]

Yeah, S. Korea has one of the most educated, open and vibrant societies in the world, along with their press/media that investigate things very throroughly. Other than when it comes to some high level money-corruption with huge conglomerate companies, the government is very transparent and cannot get away with anything. What comes out of Korea as news and numbers are what I would trust more than almost any other place in the world.

That was not the case when S.Korea was a police state till around 1990. Massive student protests during the 1980s changed the country around by then.

[Atithee]

Some good scientific approaches to treatment—the best I’ve read so far:

https://news.yahoo.com/race-coronavirus ... 18019.html

[Sin Hombre]

The US Fed cuts rates to 0.

Fed is using all the bullets it has at it's disposal to keep the markets up.

While I like proactive action, this has to be matched by political action; otherwise Fed has nothing at its disposal if a real recession hits now.

[prasen9]

Hey, doctors in India are not that clueless.

Sorry, they are. In rural areas certainly. And, the older ones in the cities too. I have first-hand experience where they could not differentiate bacterial-infection/bronchitis from asthma for four weeks! People from rural areas do travel to places such as Dhaka or Bangkok for business reasons. Or even people from urban areas as carriers traveling to rural areas cannot be ruled out. If it was that easy to say the difference, we would not need tests. There are two testing centers in Kolkata and none in the rest of the state. I doubt that we have a good handle on this. And it should not just be in India, it will be the same in most of the world except smaller countries and countries like S. Korea, who have resorted to some amount of tracking and random testing.

Kerala is different. They have the best educated and arguably certain parts of the public health system are very good. Eastern India is not that great. There is a laissez faire attitude.

[jayakris]

Hey, doctors in India are not that clueless.

Sorry, they are. In rural areas certainly.

Agree about the rural part. But this virus first hit the well-to-do section (foreign returnees), so unless somebody coming from China, the MiddlEast, Italy or USA went straight to a village somewhere and is under some local dispensary care (chances are very low for too many people like that), their cases would've been seen by a doctor in one of the bigger cities. You are right that some older docs are just clueless. So, I won't argue if you say that say 200 cases should've been found but only 115 has been, that is very much possible. I don't think it's like we have should've found 500 but have only found 112 because of poor doctors. I suspect not.

But like I also said, once we start seeing people from small villages being brought to cities for ventilator support and found to have Covid-19, all bets are off. I don't think we have had those cases just yet. Once it gets to the villages, our numbers will all be badly wrong, as so many would get ill and many would die too, without getting detected.

Unless I'm mistaken, we still do not have any case that is from "community transmission" with unknown source of infection.

[jayakris]

Every time I look up, some country or other shows more Covid-19 numbers and overtakes India. I feel bad for all those places and I do a prayer for India. We were around top-30 earlier but now down to 44th. Finally here is a ranking on which I want India to keep falling.

[prasen9]

But this virus first hit the well-to-do section (foreign returnees), so unless somebody coming from China, the MiddlEast, Italy or USA went straight to a village somewhere and is under some local dispensary care (chances are very low for too many people like that), their cases would've been seen by a doctor in one of the bigger cities.

What if visitors from China or Italy flew via Delhi and got in contact with someone at the airport who then flew to Bihar or Bengal, etc. Or some airport worker who cleaned the planes went to a rural village in UP? Really, there is no way to say that "social network" of carriers have not moved into the rural areas. The carriers never fell badly sick to be even detected. I am not talking about intentional suppression of numbers by some governments. I am talking about just not knowing because we do not have a way to test widely and find out.

[Atithee]

India's coronavirus testing rates are among the lowest in the world:

https://www.thehindu.com/data/data-indi ... 077126.ece

[jayakris]

What if visitors from China or Italy flew via Delhi and got in contact with someone at the airport who then flew to Bihar or Bengal, etc. Or some airport worker who cleaned the planes went to a rural village in UP?

Then several more of such cases of somebody who contacted it at the airport and went to big cities too. None of the hospitals have found a person who went there with Covid-19 and the only possibility is that he/she was in touch with somebody at an airport. It is possible that a businessman arranged for a 2 hour meeting in an airport terminal (that kind of a meeting can give the virus, if the other person wasn't careful) and gave it to somebody. Again, mind you, it is still possibly only a very minuscule proportion of people going through an airport (may be less than 1 percent) who has the virus, even if the person is from China or Italy. So, don't worry that a whole lot of people have escaped and gone to villages inn Bihar and Bengal. Chances are that a few people with similar transmission at an airport will show up in Kolkata or Patna before that happens. It *can* happen though, and that is when we move to "community transmission". Not just yet, that is all I'm saying. Like I said, there may indeed be 200 or even 500 cases out there in India and we have caught only 112. But probably not 2000 cases floating around in villages and poor communities, just yet. I keep praying that it won't happen. I am still pinning my hope on a much lower transmission rate in warm weather. All kinds of evidence is there so far, that this is still what is saving us from not seeing huge numbers in the thousands.