Coronavirus SARS-Cov2 (COVID-19)

[jai_in_canada]

Just wondering if all big states are on a lockdown now?

OdIsha also announcing lockdown.

As Jay predicted a couple of days ago, the entire Eastern Seaboard (TN, AP, OD, WB) will likely lock down.
Edit: Actually most of coastal India from MAH-Goa-Karnataka-Kerala-TN-AP-OD-WB will soon be in lock down > which is almost all of the lower half of India.

[jayakris]

https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation ... 99263.html
Noted virologist

Man, seriously which institution gave him his doctor degree?

Lol! Probably the same one that gave that scoundrel Fauci and that rascal Tedros their degrees. If Bill Gates can get so much air time in this pandemic, why shouldn't this quack?

Well, his MBBS is from (where else?) Government medical college, Thiruvananthapuram. Apparently has an MRCP from Edinburough. Professor emeritus at CMC Vellore. Considered to be an expert but he has been saying all kinds of things all over the place, all through this pandemic.

[jayakris]

Finally this happened! But it took 14 months into the pandemic, 2 months into the massive second wave, and it was done by the Supreme Court ... NOT by Mr. Narendra (Atma Nirbhar) Modi. Bewildering lack of visible leadership, regular direct communication to the nation, and tangible plan from the country's PM while the country is gripped by an unprecedented national emergency. So the Judicial Branch of Government had to step in. Un-freaking-believable.

Covid-19: Supreme Court Sets Up 12-Member National Task Force for Oxygen Distribution to States
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/co ... r-BB1gv6lG

I think you got this wrong. That may be just my view though. We can't say anything much very definitely when it comes to Covid. I think the Supreme Court is basically coming in after the fact and wasting everybody's time, after the Centre had already handled the oxygen issue to a large extent. The problems happened purely because the "experts" predicted that we would only get some 100K cases and the Centre and everybody thought may be 200-250K in the worst case. If that is where we went, we would not have had any oxygen issue.

If the demand for ANY item in India goes to 2 or 3 times the prediction within 10-15 days, what happened was bound to happen. Again, our great bandwagon press does not report the things that actually got done to (mostly) solve the Oxygen issue. It was a one-week to 10 days issue in India though it probably caused the death a 1000 people or more (just an estimate from me) in that period. People are still having to run around to find cylinders but generally the oxygen issue is getting solved already. Don't forget that despite what the press writes, oxygen express trains had started a week before Kejriwal suddenly said that he had only 6 hours of oxygen in Delhi. It wasn't like nobody knew, or that an expert task force would've done anything different.

Supreme court should stay the hell out of executive matters. I am serious. Who the hell are justices Chandrachud and Shah to get into this matter, and make such decisions after a few hours (if even that) of education on the topic by lawyers?

Look at that task force. 12 doctors. Like the doctors know anything at all about oxygen distribution! How ridiculous. It is an an industries and logistics issue, to be handled by engineers and planners. I cannot believe how stupid the supreme court is, in this matter. Now there are 12 clueless doctors asking for Zoom meetings and wasting the time of IAS guys who should be spending their time on other urgent matters, not educating the doctors on emergency planning and execution.

I hope that they expand the mandate of this task force to include decision support (not authoritarian directives) to the State Governments for corrective measures (like lock downs, mask mandate), public service announcements/education, consolidated national reporting/analysis with input from the states, and allocation planning of scarce medical resources (testing, hospital beds, doctors, nurses) in addition to oxygen and medicine across states. Right now the States are twisting in the wind by themselves. We don't want centralized, out-of-touch, sledgehammer decision making from Delhi for all of India without considering the unique circumstances of each district, but there does need to be some Central guidance and support for planning, information sharing, and logistics.

India has had a task force with mainly people from NITI-aayog and ICMR doing this all along. They have not been in the limelight and projected as a "task force" getting on TV every day, because that is not how India generally does these things. But they have been on the job all along.

The states were not twisting in the wind at all. If they did, it's because they wanted to sit and twist. In fact if they would simply take the Centre's advice, 75% of our problems would not happen. I can list from last April how many cases of absolutely timely interference there were from the center, into so many states' mishandling of things, and how often the Centre's advice was simply not followed.

All that happened now was that he virus spread happened so much faster than anybody predicted. If that were to happene, India was going to be in trouble. And we were. I am sure our central govt and state governments could've done things better, but I generally see both of them coming through better on the Covid matters than a whole lot of other problematic issues in our country for so long. They have all worked much harder than I expected.

[jai_in_canada]

Jay, I thought it over after my post, and I'm with your way of seeing it. I am not happy with the Judiciary getting involved. Also, I had completely forgotten that there was already an advisory task force. I received the following note from a journalist friend. He's a rabidly anti-Modi left winger, so i take it with a large pinch of salt. Still I take his point about too many committees.

"Dr Kang and those on the committee are great experts on public health but what’s the use of the committee if the govt pays no heed to them? Now we have a 12-member committee on Oxygen, constituted by the Supreme Court. We already have a national task force on covid which reports to the PM, headed by V K Paul of Niti Aayog, a paediatrician. ICMR’s Dr Bhargava is on that committee. But during the three months prior to the explosion of second wave cases, that committee met only twice. Dr Bhargava’s recommendation against holding the Kumbh Mela was not heeded. The WHO protocol removing Remdesivir has not been updated.
We can have any number of committees, but there must be utter chaos in the admin. As Kejriwal said in the conference with the PM, ‘We don’t know whom to call for oxygen.’ Imagine the CM of Delhi saying that about the national govt in Delhi."

[jayakris]

The journalist friend is right that Dr. Kang should be in the Government's task force. Actually I believe she does kinda get along with the Government. My understanding is that they had indeed relied on her earlier on (I may be wrong). She gets used by the press because she seems to be an academic type does not seem to be a good enough politician while speaking and her words get twisted. The rest of the people the Supreme court has in the task force seemed to be just doctors and hospital administrators who have no clue on national oxygen distribution matters.

[jayakris]

Meanwhile, it seems yesterday's total was more by 5K. That is because Telengana suddenly started reporting by 8 pm. That is what they did early last year and then one fine day they didn't send the report and said they will only report the NEXT day. So that used to come at 1 or 2 am in the morning, added to the next day. Now they suddenly flipped back. Yesterday's total was up by 5K, because TEL gave two days numbers in two bulletins, one early morning and one this morning, which is stamped for 8 pm yesterday. Huh???

And then today they gave one for 5:30 pm. Not sure what game Kachara is playing.

I was trying to figure out what the heck was happening with the numbers Kachara strikes!

[jayakris]

So far it is +394.5 today, as we await the Jharkhand numbers. Almost the same as yesterday. There is actually a 3K more in Maharashtra but that is conciliation of cases from earlier. Looks like a 402K again. That will actually go as a drop from yesterday, as yesterday total officially in 406.9K thanks to Telangana's change in reporting date.

Still not seeing any signs at all that our national total will go up again now.

[jayakris]

I received the following note from a journalist friend. He's a rabidly anti-Modi left winger, so i take it with a large pinch of salt. Still I take his point about too many committees.

"We can have any number of committees, but there must be utter chaos in the admin. As Kejriwal said in the conference with the PM, ‘We don’t know whom to call for oxygen.’ Imagine the CM of Delhi saying that about the national govt in Delhi

I had to separately comments in this. Your friend is being totally disingenuous. Because he should know that all Khichdiwal does is to yap and create drama. If he is a journalist, he should know what happened.

"We don't know whom to call", says Khichdiwal? Bloody hell, YOU are supposed to know whom to call. Because it is your state and people will call YOU. You did no proper monitoring of oxygen issues and you knew that the Centre was already moving tankers in trains, by the time you moved and said there was only a few hours of oxygen left in Delhi (after saying barely a couple of days before that Delhi had no oxygen issue). Didn't know whom to call, he says. Go to hell, you embarrassment for all IITans. If you didn't know, you should know that the one person you could call was the PM right there next door. Call his office, damn it. It's a local call. And we know what you did. You waited an extra day to be on a Zoom meeting that the PM called with other CMs and then live-streamed (without persmission) yourself asking the PM for an oxygen express for political purposes, you wretched drama queen! We also know that you got a mouthful from Modi on that later, so shut the hell up, you Khichdi!

[Atithee]

I’m still in disbelief that our Supreme Court gets involved in the kinds of things it does. My favorite is whether people should stand up for national anthem in cinemas. Yup, a huge national issue.

Anyway, did someone move the court or they intervened on their own? And, a few more questions:

1. Is supplying oxygen a central government function?
2. What authority does Supreme Court have to order the government about oxygen supply?
3. By what authority do they create committees to handle an industrial supply demand issue?
4. A lot of the oxygen is produced privately; who can force the producer to do something they can’t or don’t want to do?
5. When will the Supreme Court tell people to behave? When will they cancel elections and large gatherings?

[Atithee]

Pulitzer greed strikes again. LA Times is seeking one for itself too, it seems.

Warning—Indian scribe ahead! I should patent this, ha ha...

Op-Ed: How anti-democratic politics make India's COVID calamity worse
Prerna Singh
Sat, May 8, 2021, 3:15 AM PDT

https://news.yahoo.com/op-ed-anti-democ ... 32188.html

[jayakris]

^^^ It's a feeding frenzy. Just don't read it. The sad thing is that it is pretty much impossible to refute the crap these people write. Because none of these critics know even the basics of anything. It is like Modi and some policies have caused the second wave and the deaths. If the whole country's press and a huge fraction of people never understood the pandemic and paid no attention to the fundamentals and details, it is impossible to teach them now. Modi may never recover from this, which will be very unfair, but that is how the world is.

It is just frustrating for people like us who followed it day in and day out for a whole year and learned what the pandemic is all about. At least we know that we don't know anything very well about the virus and what it does, but all these people are suddenly experts. So damn frustrating. I don't read any articles anymore, because I just cannot stand the stupidity and ignorance that is all-pervasive now.

And as for the supreme court, I can never make any sense of what our Supreme Court gets into, and does -- especially if justice Chandrachud is on the bench.

[jayakris]

So, +400.8K was the final today. It will go as 403.8K, officially, because of the 3K earlier cases that were added in MAH. But today's case additions were from 2136K tests at 18.77% positivity. The 3-day average of positivity has fallen for three consecutive days from 19.01 to 18.5 now. That is a good sign...

The 7-day average of case numbers rose by about +1180 today, so it is almost flat now. The 7-day average curve had risen by as much as 16K for several days earlier, the last 10 days sequence is 7.7K, 8.1K, 6.2K, 2.2K, 5.2K, 2.8K, 4.7K, 3.9K, 0.7K, 1.2K... It has clearly slowed down and hopefully will be turning negative within the next 3-4 days.

The deaths were 4092 today. Less than yesterday's 4233. Hopefully that will also start dropping now.

-------------
ICMR Update: 302,275,471 total tests... Saturday tests: 1,865,428...

[suresh]

Two of my friends have tested positive after two doses of Covishield! Both are symptomatic but nothing severe.

[jai_in_canada]

^^^ It's a feeding frenzy. Just don't read it. The sad thing is that it is pretty much impossible to refute the crap these people write.

More dogs fighting over a piece of meat. Put on your head set and ignore the barking. It will die down with the wave. Then they will go to another piece of meat and bark, growl, howl and gnash their teeth over that.

Having said that, i hope that there are no more elections, religious melas, large social gatherings, sporting/entertainment events etc. until the WHO has declared the pandemic over. Sure it will hurt the economically vulnerable but not worse than lock downs forced by waves blamed rightly or wrongly on such events.

[jai_in_canada]

Two of my friends have tested positive after two doses of Covishield! Both are symptomatic but nothing severe.

I know 3 people who got infected with Covid-19 after 2 shots of Covishield. All 3 ended up in hospital with severe infections. All 3 had minor comorbidities. 2 out the 3 had been very careful with masking and physical distancing even after the shot. Happened within 2 weeks of second shot. Ironically hospital acquired infection is suspected in 2 of the people- when they went to get their second shots.

Can hospitals not have open air vaccination camps in parking lots, sports fields etc? Would refrigeration be an issue? It is summer, so I get that operating out of tents may be a challenge, but ventilation is key when there is so much human traffic .