[Chetan_Rao]

Well, it appears knowledge of a 'disease outbreak' in China wasn't exactly unknown until late December, as is being claimed worldwide. At the very least, knowledge that something's up and should be investigated further reportedly existed since mid-November.

Times of Israel news report dated 16 Apr 2020.

US intelligence agencies alerted Israel to the coronavirus outbreak in China already in November, Israeli television reported Thursday.

According to Channel 12 news, the US intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of that month and drew up a classified document...

...US intelligence informed the Trump administration, “which did not deem it of interest,” but the report said the Americans also decided to update two allies with the classified document: NATO and Israel, specifically the IDF.

The network said Israeli military officials later in November discussed the possibility of the spread of the virus to the region and how it would affect Israel and neighboring countries.

The intelligence also reached Israel’s decision makers and the Health Ministry, where “nothing was done,” according to the report.

The report points to another article by ABC News USA dated 09 Apr 2020 that points to a similar timeline.

ABC News report.

As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.

Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.

The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia -- forces that depend on the NCMI’s work....

...From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policy-makers and decision-makers across the federal government as well as the National Security Council at the White House. All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said. For something to have appeared in the PDB, it would have had to go through weeks of vetting and analysis, according to people who have worked on presidential briefings in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

"The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing," the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. "But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something the military needed to take a posture on."

NCMI is a component of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. Together, the agencies’ core responsibilities are to ensure U.S. military forces have the information they need to carry out their missions -- both offensively and defensively. It is a critical priority for the Pentagon to keep American service members healthy on deployments.

The Pentagon, specifically the Director of NCMI who falls under the Defense Intelligence Agency, denied that any such reporting exists, but if that's true, it points to a monumental failure on part of NCMI & DIA, given their stated objective (highlighted in bold above).

This is what mediabiasfactcheck.com has to say about the two outlets:

Overall, we rate the Times of Israel Left-Center biased based on editorial positions that slightly favor the left. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record.

Overall, we rate ABC News Left-Center biased based on story selection and word choices that moderately favor the left and High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a reasonable fact check record.

[kavensri]

I am still not able to understand this ‘low number of cases/death due to under testing in India’ discussion.
Agree that we may see a spike in number of cases if we do more and more testing, but the number of deaths should not change, am I right?
My point here is, number of cases in India may be much higher than what we know, but there is something different here (either the variant of virus or people’s immune system) that is causing the mortality is to be much lower compared to those western countries? Any thoughts?

[srishiva]

Originally Posted by kavensri

I am still not able to understand this ‘low number of cases/death due to under testing in India’ discussion.
Agree that we may see a spike in number of cases if we do more and more testing, but the number of deaths should not change, am I right?
My point here is, number of cases in India may be much higher than what we know, but there is something different here (either the variant of virus or people’s immune system) that is causing the mortality is to be much lower compared to those western countries? Any thoughts?

The theory is that many deaths due to covid might not have been reported as such. In our country only 70% of deaths are registered. And we might not know who died of what.

Another thing is when the virus is circulating in population, not everyone will have symptoms. There might be more of these people who later might spread and cause a jump in cases.

Currently our mortality rate is close to 3% (out of infected) which is not very low. If you find that much more people had the virus (not detected), the rates could be very low. In South Korea and Germany, they do lots of tests and the mortality ratio hence might show a low ratio.

So you need to do lots of tests, isolate people and make sure you they dont spread.

[nagr22]

Originally Posted by srishiva

Currently our mortality rate is close to 3% (out of infected) which is not very low. If you find that much more people had the virus (not detected), the rates could be very low. In South Korea and Germany, they do lots of tests and the mortality ratio hence might show a low ratio.

Germany has tested more than 2% of its population (20000 tests per million) and its current mortality rate is 5% and of the remaining cases 8% of the population is in critical condition. So we cannot conclusively say that by testing more people the mortality ratio will be low. If anything it only shows how deadly this invisible enemy is and calls for a very diligent social isolation.

So you need to do lots of tests, isolate people and make sure you they dont spread.

This is the ideal course of action but in a country the size of India this is extremely difficult to implement. Firstly, on what basis can we do lots of tests? Who should be called for testing? Only those with travel history/contact with positive cases/symptomatic or should we test everyone? If we test 1 crore people per day, it still requires 3 months of lockdown. Is it feasible? Currently the government has notified around 200 districts as red zones. Even if we were to test everyone in those districts, it will still need a month at the least. So no matter how we look at it, lockdown for few weeks seems like the most sensible thing to do. We should definitely increase the testing capacity so that we'll be able to handle if at all we reach community transmission stage. But in my opinion there is no need to increase the testing right now as long as we are thorough with contact tracing and testing all symptomatic cases. And obviously we all should contribute by staying home.

[kavensri]

Originally Posted by srishiva

The theory is that many deaths due to covid might not have been reported as such. In our country only 70% of deaths are registered. And we might not know who died of what.

Currently our mortality rate is close to 3% (out of infected) which is not very low. If you find that much more people had the virus (not detected), the rates could be very low. In South Korea and Germany, they do lots of tests and the mortality ratio hence might show a low ratio.

Even if you consider ‘only 70% death getting registered’ and extrapolate the data, still the number of deaths are low, isn’t it?
And if we consider that we are under testing and hence more numbers (hypothetically) can be added to ‘Number of cases’, then the ratio would still be very low.

Regarding Germany’s case, the ratio was low just one week back. But the number of deaths are increasing in the recent days and hence you see that the ratio is not that low anymore.
But, I agree that some of the countries like SK, Russia, Canada, UAE, Australia may have kept the number of deaths to low due to extensive testing.
If you refer to the table below, I feel that the percentage would be even lower for India when we start doing more testing.

[vivek95]

Originally Posted by nagr22

Germany has tested more than 2% of its population (20000 tests per million) and its current mortality rate is 5% and of the remaining cases 8% of the population is in critical condition. So we cannot conclusively say that by testing more people the mortality ratio will be low. If anything it only shows how deadly this invisible enemy is and calls for a very diligent social isolation.

No Sir, as I had mentioned earlier, that 5% is the Case fatality rate. Please remember that case fatality rate and mortality rate are different calculations. The former takes into account the total number of cases as denominator while the latter looks at the entire population as denominator. Hence, Germany is well maintaining its mortality rates below 2%. This can be attributed to large scale testing, thereby early detection of large number of positive cases, initiating early isolation and treatment measures and ultimately less number of deaths.

-Dr. Vivek

[sachinayak]

Originally Posted by kavensri

I am still not able to understand this ‘low number of cases/death due to under testing in India’ discussion.
Agree that we may see a spike in number of cases if we do more and more testing, but the number of deaths should not change, am I right?....Any thoughts?

This was discussed in this thread earlier, but will repeat.

India has a very large population. There are a lot of factors that lead to deaths. Taking a simple example of deaths caused by road accidents. We have approximately 1 life lost every 4 minutes (360 per day) in India on a normal day due to road accidents, but would be close to zero now, given the lockdown situation. Now lets hypothetically assume we have close to 360 deaths per day due to COVID-19, though not tested and thus not reported. There would be no spike for anyone to notice. And I am talking of one cause only. There are many other such causes e.g. ~86 deaths daily due to drowning.

The example provided earlier in this thread was that if there is an accident due to drunken driving resulting in a death and an alcohol test isn't conducted, it would get reported as a death due to negligent driving or something similar. It would not get reported as death due to driving under influence. On similar lines, unless our testing coverage is not increased, we will never know the cause of any death today. Such deaths would get attributed to a number of other reasons like other diseases or natural causes or old-age.

[naveenroy]

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

Well, it appears knowledge of a 'disease outbreak' in China wasn't exactly unknown until late December, as is being claimed worldwide. At the very least, knowledge that something's up and should be investigated further reportedly existed since mid-November.

The report points to another article by ABC News USA dated 09 Apr 2020 that points to a similar timeline.


The Pentagon, specifically the Director of NCMI who falls under the Defense Intelligence Agency, denied that any such reporting exists, but if that's true, it points to a monumental failure on part of NCMI & DIA, given their stated objective (highlighted in bold above).

Thanks for the info! I was always convinced that this virus was known long ago - I thought it was in Jan. But looks like it even goes back to November. So governments - even the US sat on their hands, having closed door meetings and selling stocks and buying stocks to cash in on this pandemic.

The outrage about the WHO - saying they are agents of China etc seem to be bluster now.

[dark.knight]

Originally Posted by naveenroy

The outrage about the WHO - saying they are agents of China etc seem to be bluster now.

Trump-et is hiring Vince McMahon as a part of an economic advisory team, of which Vince will be the head of. Now with his all star squad coming together, all we need are Eric Trump, Don Jr, Omarosa, George Ross, Dennis Rodman (diplomat), Bill Rancic etc and America will become Celebrity Apprentice 2020.

I used to be a big fan of The Apprentice, absolutely loved the show being a business enthusiast, but the the man is certainly not qualified for this position of Commander in Chief. Not that the past 3 were massively better.

Maybe though, 2 cut-throat billionaires like Trump and McMahon are exactly what America needs today to kick start the money machine.

[rdst_1]

On another Indian forum, Techenclave, there is a member, who is a WHO doctor currently working in Spain and going to New York in a few days.
He is an Indian who did all his studies in India including Masters in Epidemiology and Public Health. He has painted a very grim picture and many, including me, are keen to agree with him because of his knowledge and experience.
He is very critical of how India is currently handling this crisis and says that more and more tests is the only way to flatten the curve and not doing that while in lockdown is a big failure. He also pointed out that we have not asked for any help from the WHO or it's very experienced epidemiologists. Also, IMA is not allowing doctors to raise important questions in public domain. He himself used the services of NIMHANS and the doctor who he talked to told him that they have been specifically instructed to tell the callers that this is just like Flu, but a little severe, even though they know that is not true.
He has also opened up about the failure of the WHO administrative body and shared a few things about how China handled it and how WHO hid the data despite knowing it.

[hondafanboy]

Originally Posted by rdst_1

working in Spain and going to New York in a few days.

I am extremely happy to know that he is going there. There is nothing wrong with being critical of government but there are others in the field ( ICMR, Doctors etc.) who are dealing with situation and dealing very effectively so far considering the challenges we face. Yes , not just this doctor and WHO even we would like to be in a place where 1.3 billion test kits are made available and everyone gets tested. But that's not going to happen. Whether it is necessary or not , its up to the experts to decide and execute.


On a serious note, I thank him for his work in Spain and now in NYC during this tough time and wish him the best.

[v1p3r]

Originally Posted by hondafanboy

I am extremely happy to know that he is going there.

You are 'extremely happy to know' that he is going from one death zone to another, risking his life?

[tsk1979]

Originally Posted by kavensri

Even if you consider ‘only 70% death getting registered’ and extrapolate the data, still the number of deaths are low, isn’t it?
And if we consider that we are under testing and hence more numbers (hypothetically) can be added to ‘Number of cases’, then the ratio would still be very low.

Regarding Germany’s case, the ratio was low just one week back. But the number of deaths are increasing in the recent days and hence you see that the ratio is not that low anymore.
But, I agree that some of the countries like SK, Russia, Canada, UAE, Australia may have kept the number of deaths to low due to extensive testing.
If you refer to the table below, I feel that the percentage would be even lower for India when we start doing more testing.

Data is only good as its source.
A person dies, and is never tested, would death be marked covid related.
Or a person dies of heart attack, has covid. Would death be attributed to covid.

In the smaller more remote and poorer parts of India, where the only healthcare is a tiny underfunded primary health center, how many dead people do you think will be tested for covid?

In India the nominal death rate is 7+ /1000 people.

So its around 1.3 million deaths a year normally. How many of these are really going to be tested?

Right now we do not have clear answers. Our data analysis and maths is perfect, but the data sourcing is not.

So we know if I take a basket of 2 apples and add it with another basket of 5 apples, I will get 7 apples. But did I count 2 and 5 right? That is the big scary question.

[Dhiwakar92]

On the other side of this lock down, we're starting at a country that has a weaker currency, a higher number of poor people and a dead job market for some time to come.

That might be just as bad or worse than the pandemic's effects on our country.

The anti-chinese sentiment is warranted, though only to an extent.

Mod Note: Please strictly avoid political comments or baits for political discussion.

[vsrivatsa]

Some positive news but still early days:, this is not a vaccine but seems to be aiding people already infected with the virus.

Early peek at data on Gilead coronavirus drug suggests patients are responding to treatment - URL

Gilead Drug Trial

Gilead Says Coronavirus Drug Is Working