[Chetan_Rao]

Originally Posted by dailydriver

Just in case you have missed it....

It reportedly goes much, much further back.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by Dhiwakar92

seeing this situation in India has only motivated me even harder to leave the country and settle elsewhere, fingers crossed I do that before my time on this planet is up :(

Where? Those famously "developed" countries, like USA? UK? Italy? Spain? They may have certain advantages (India, no doubt, has many too) but they are not places that I would like to be during an attack of a raging highly contagious disease!

[v1p3r]

I have been following a doctor posting on techenclave as 'red dragon' - someone on of this forum's covid-19 threads pointed him out. His posts make for terrifying reading. He is an infectious diseases specialist / epidemiologist working with the WHO on contract. Currently in Spain, headed to NYC. He has called out our under preparedness, saying that we wasted precious lockdown time by not ramping up infra. According to him, our doctors have almost no experience dealing with this sort of stuff, through no fault of their own. The higher ups are whiling away time, hoping that 'this too shall pass'. I have heard this separately - docs with no training like psychiatrists are being sent to the frontlines without PPE and told to 'stay away from infected patients'. To make matters worse, his own wife, also in a similar work position, has tested positive.

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Where? Those famously "developed" countries, like USA? UK? Italy? Spain? They may have certain advantages (India, no doubt, has many too) but they are not places that I would like to be during an attack of a raging highly contagious disease!

I do apologise, but would you like to be in Dharavi instead? Because that is what the average urban citizen in a big Indian city calls daily life. Rest assured, if you fall ill and are not rich (enough to spend time online on a car forum, like we all are), you are at the mercy of an abysmal public health system, with gallant but overworked doctors, bad infrastructure, and a government that can't seem to make up its mind. We can't even get accident victims to the hospitals in time, forget dealing with pandemics. I have lived on both sides of this divide and availed of free government services, and I know which I'd trust ten times out of ten.

[carboy]

Most of it is too late for anyone to learn - I mean, they started in Jan itself, but still a good read - https://www.technologyreview.com/202...a-coronavirus/

KK Shailaja & Nooh need to lead the national response team.

[sunishsamuel]

Meanwhile Kerala is preparing for additional patients. They have now arranged houseboats to double up as isolation wards. Smart usage of resources I'd say.

Houseboats in Kerala to double up as Covid-19 isolation wards

The second link is in malayalam and i cannot find the english version.

Summary:

Houseboats have been prepared to work as isolation wards in case Indians from other states or countries are coming back to Kerala. Approximately 2000 people can be accommodated. Detailed plans for disposing trash etc. ready. The collector will be responsible for delivering food to the patients in isolation wards through District Tourism council. They have parked all houseboats in one location and also completed a successful mock drill.

Floating Isolation wards Ready

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Where? Those famously "developed" countries, like USA? UK? Italy? Spain? They may have certain advantages (India, no doubt, has many too) but they are not places that I would like to be during an attack of a raging highly contagious disease!

As a British citizen, you grew up under free healthcare provided by NHS. For the uninformed, can you explain you prefer India over UK during this COVID-19 crisis? Why you feel safer in suburbs of Chennai than London?

[Lambydude]

Originally Posted by Samurai

As a British citizen, you grew up under free healthcare provided by NHS. For the uninformed, can you explain you prefer India over UK during this COVID-19 crisis? Why you feel safer in suburbs of Chennai than London?

Going by pure numbers, I would still prefer to stay in my hometown in Kerala than any of these "Developed" countries or even metro cities in India with fancy multi speciality hospitals, during Covid.

Reason: developed countries may have high speciality treatments and facilities. But during Covid, it is the primary health infrastructure that matters more and not the fancy hospitals. Add to it the volunteering mentality of the people in these small towns. In these places, people are equally worried about if their neighbour have enough food supplies.

[vibbs]

Most of the developed countries have a good primary health care system as well. So it's a bit perplexing about why the rates are so high.

But one important aspect could be the average age.

Italy for example has an average life expectancy in 80s. Majority of deaths are of people above 65 years. In india majority will die at 65 even without Coronavirus. I am not trying to downplay the fight put up by Indians and our Medicare system. But just implying that we need a deeper introspection to arrive at reasons why we see less deaths in India compared to rest of the world before passing judgement that our public healthcare is better than the west.

[dragracer567]

A piece of news from Times of India yesterday that first Kerala and now Tamil Nadu have started to flatten their curves. Link

fresh daily cases in Kerala dropping to the single-digit level in the past one week while the number of people getting discharged from hospitals in Tamil Nadu exceeding those getting admitted.

Also, Tamil Nadu dropped from third to fifth in the number of cases in India. Here's to hoping that other states follow suit!

[V.Narayan]

Rather off topic but as you have written it I feel the urge to respond.

Originally Posted by Dhiwakar92

What is frustrating is that going forward, I doubt this will lead to a fundamental change in how we live our lives in India. A few months from now, we all will go back to square one and that is the best case scenario.

I do not know what fundamental change you are looking for or how you measure change or how you determine if change is adequate to applaud. While India fumbles and bumbles along I have seen India in its own unique way undergo more change socially, economically, opportunity wise, geo-politically in the last 70 years than almost any other country, other than China {PS: I've lived through most of those years and been reading newspapers for 50 of those 70}. And in our own disorganized way we managed it without killing millions in pogroms like the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward or without imploding {USSR, Yugoslavia} or running genocide campaigns {East Pakistan, Rwanda, Cambodia} or bombing other countries back to the stone age {USA - Vietnam, Iraq} or.....

The worst case scenario is the implementation of asinine rules and regulations based on fear and popular opinion, not science and rational thought. This is even more frustrating.

A very broad sweeping statement without a single supporting fact as an example or even a personal experience as an illustration is usually at best an opinion or at worst bigotry.

[Lambydude]

Originally Posted by vibbs

Most of the developed countries have a good primary health care system as well. So it's a bit perplexing about why the rates are so high.

But one important aspect could be the average age.

Italy for example has an average life expectancy in 80s. Majority of deaths are of people above 65 years. In india majority will die at 65 even without Coronavirus. I am not trying to downplay the fight put up by Indians and our Medicare system. But just implying that we need a deeper introspection to arrive at reasons why we see less deaths in India compared to rest of the world before passing judgement that our public healthcare is better than the west.

It's not just the primary health infrastructure. Another factor which I feel was crucial in the case of Kerala is contact tracing and the role of health workers and even normal public on tracing and isolating the infected. The health workers worked selflessly in the initial phase by isolating anyone who might have had a remote possibility of having come in contact with an infected person.

My dad had lunch from a coffee house where an infected person visited a day after. Still health workers some how found that my dad went there and came and checked. All those who had visited the coffee house that day was quarantined irrespective of if they were there at the same time or not. Such stringent contact tracing and isolation is, in my opinion, one of the major factors which helped Kerala's case.

Needless to say this is effective if done at the right time. That is at the beginning of the spread when the numbers are low. Developed countries didn't act at the right time.

[V.Narayan]

Covid-19 has not gone viral in India yet but some in the world and at home can't accept the truth

https://theprint.in/national-interes...-truth/404178/

A first class essay by Shekhar Gupta who is one of the most outspoken yet balanced of senior journalists with none of the pretensions and prejudices of the Lutyens Delhi Khan Market media wallahs.

What he writes also reflects how India has in some ways moved on while certain sections of our own people and the West are still lost in the India of 1975.

Excerpts from the article....

Yet, the truth that many, especially in the global commentariat, find so inconvenient is that contrary to what so many wise people with fancy degrees from a university in this league or that might have asserted by now, millions or lakhs, or even tens of thousands of us, are not dying. Apologies for letting you down.

Our drains are not filled with bodies, our hospitals have not run out of beds. Our crematoriums and graveyards are not out of wood or space. There is not even a cricket field-sized sliver of India anywhere that might help you make a convenient or macabre comparison with the Spanish Flu of 1918. The India of 2020 is not perfect. But it is a far cry from the India of that past.

That good news, or absence of expected bad news, is the truth that so many in the international community, and also within India, seem unable to handle. Isn’t it too good to be true?

The daily Government of India briefing on the Covid-19 crisis is often criticised for opacity, lack of information, and some Yes Minister-style bureaucratic ducking and weaving. But it gives you a set of data. We have the right, then, to be suspicious. But we then have to find facts from somewhere to counter it.

One scholar who tracks this data each day and publishes a string of brilliantly informative charts is Brookings Institution’s Shamika Ravi. You can check these out on her Twitter handle here. Her key chart shows us how India’s infection numbers had picked up pace by 23 March, but then began a decline, especially once the Tablighi bulge was absorbed, by early April. The numbers went from doubling in 3 days to 5, then 4 (with the Tablighi cluster), and now stand at 8 days. Her chart also assumes that if there was no lockdown, India’s infections would be about nine times higher than the figure now.

You can extend the same logic to fatalities and positive tests also. Both have generally remained in the same ballpark, about 3.4 per cent and 4.1 per cent, respectively.

Now, how can this be true, you can well ask. Can you trust official data? Look elsewhere. As we did.

The data plotted by the darling of the public health community, World Health Organization, plots the rate of doubling in 7 days now. As does the European Centre for Disease Control. Most delightfully, the darling of the doomsayers, Johns Hopkins University, whose logo was used by a set of them predicting millions of us dead, and was called out for misusing it, plots this rate of doubling of Covid cases in India at 8 days.

Of course, you may still say this is too good to be true; that everyone, from a top UN organisation to a premier European institution to a globally-respected university are all complicit with the Modi government. You may be right. But we will repeat to you that Narayana Murthy caveat. Bring data. Unless you think you are God.

I spend most of my time, especially during the lockdown, reading up and watching whatever is available globally on coronavirus. Every couple of days, there is a story or a commentary insinuating and implying three things: One, India must be concealing figures. Sometimes a snide remark in a TV discussion. Two, that India will soon — and inevitably — be the worst victim of the virus with millions dead. And three, that we in the Indian media are either complicit with the Modi government and won’t speak the truth, or so intimidated that we can’t.

The fact is that all our reporters are also looking at the same set of data points with a high degree of suspicion. Something to prove that the government figures are a gross under-estimation or a China/North Korea style fudge. But we do not find such facts — at hospitals, in surveillance figures, from so many state governments where anti-BJP parties rule. Health, in India, is a state subject.

An easy option is to follow the way of the BBC which, earlier this week, ran a story quoting two anonymous doctors from an unnamed hospital in Mumbai claiming lots of people were dying of respiratory collapse but were either not tested for Covid or not declared its victims. Would they run a story like that on Britain, or any other country where they’d treat human life in a more dignified, less cavalier fashion? But this is the ‘bhookha–nanga’ India, what is the story if it isn’t at least a few hundred thousands of Indians dead? Especially when the UK, Italy, Spain, the US, are already floating in high five figures. Or unless you begin counting for bodies like our Holy National Accountant of Yore used to count notional losses, with series freely added. India, unfortunately, has a very recent experience of having been subjected to such callous and criminal excess by global influencers, especially from some sections of foundation-fattened public health mafias. Strong words, but why waste euphemisms on those who unanimously counted India’s HIV positive cases to be 5.7 million and rising? Until the summer of 2007, when a paper in Lancet derailed the gravy train? Everyone, from UNAIDS to WHO to the richest foundations, all conveniently rectified the numbers. You know to what: 2.5 million. India was being subjected to a 128 per cent exaggeration.

India’s numbers have been dropping since. You can read two stories from the venerable New York Times here and here on how everyone who had been complicit quietly retreated and reset. No one said sorry.

A few honourable Indians complained. Civil servant S.Y. Quraishi (then head of the National Aids Control Organisation or NACO) in 2005, and before that, Shatrughan Sinha as health minister in 2002, when Bill Gates arrived with a grant of $100 million for AIDS control and predicted that by 2010, India will have 20-25 million cases. They were ignored.

They all got away with it, including so many in our bureaucracy, activists and health NGOs, who had joined that well-funded, wine ’n cheese war to ‘save’ India. They all retreated. But the damage they did wasn’t just philosophical. It was real. The Hollywoodisation of AIDS in India took attention and resources away from more real issues. Like tuberculosis, to begin with.

[Latheesh]

Interview with Head of Epidemiology & Communicable Diseases of Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) Dr.Raman Gangakhedkar.

https://youtu.be/gmXjg7_gACc

[vb-saan]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Covid-19 has not gone viral in India yet but some in the world and at home can't accept the truth

This is definitely good news, and with whatever said shortcomings, the spread is contained quite well. There are contrasting views on the lockdown, and some may still feel that its the Indian immunity and hot weather that contained the virus. Inconveniences notwithstanding, I believe the measures taken by the authorities have really helped in containing the spread. And at least on the decision-making levels there is certain level of harmony displayed, which again worked in the country's favour.

[tsk1979]

An easy option is to follow the way of the BBC which, earlier this week, ran a story quoting two anonymous doctors from an unnamed hospital in Mumbai claiming lots of people were dying of respiratory collapse but were either not tested for Covid or not declared its victims. Would they run a story like that on Britain, or any other country where they’d treat human life in a more dignified, less cavalier fashion?

I could not understand this what is he trying to say. US newspapers and TV channels ran multiple stories of doctors saying that the Federal govt is not providing PPEs, mismanaging etc., Doctors have also been suspended for speaking in front of cameras in USA. India is not being singled out for such reporting

India’s numbers have been dropping since. You can read two stories from the venerable New York Times here and here on how everyone who had been complicit quietly retreated and reset. No one said sorry.

The 4 day prediction was made before lockdown. After lockdown case growth drop. I mean what was expected? That the numbers should double every 4 days even after lockdown? I can't get his point. Is he saying that the people saying that numbers will double every 4 days were wrong and we should not have gone into lockdown?
Our own experts said if no lockdown was come we could see a situation like Italy. That's why the govt did the lockdown?
He is going on a train of perceived victimhood. Yes, many publications are highlighting the plight of migrant workers, and they are indeed the victims in all this.

They all got away with it, including so many in our bureaucracy, activists and health NGOs, who had joined that well-funded, wine ’n cheese war to ‘save’ India. They all retreated. But the damage they did wasn’t just philosophical. It was real. The Hollywoodisation of AIDS in India took attention and resources away from more real issues.

This is a ridiculous argument. Its the same argument which many foreigners give when they say why is India wasting money on moon missions instead of eradicating poverty. Just because tuberculosis exists, it does not mean other diseases do not. There is no wine and cheese. There were real efforts made to eradicate many diseases, and the success of India in eradicating polio (from being the country with highest number of cases in 2010) is lauded everywhere
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-25709362

And the articles he puts forth somehow fitting his worldview are from 2007, when AIDS cases were overestimated. Indian numbers went down from 5 million to 2.5 million. But there was no conspiracy against India. The numbers went down in most places when proper procedure was followed. At 2.5 million its still an epidemic though less severe. And he does not seem to realize that part of the program was widespread distribution of condoms to sex workers.
Imagine you go to a place where tuberculosis is building up and say, hey if you do not give BCG one million will die. Everyone takes BCG only few hundred die, and then Mr Gupta writes an article about how an alarmist anti India foreign media man is tried to show India in bad light because only 200 died and he lied. AIDS, Polio etc., were eradicated because the warnings were heeded. Even today there exist campaigns to slow down spread of AIDS through free condom distribution.

Like tuberculosis, to begin with.

https://www.who.int/tb/publications/...ia-history/en/
Tuberculosis is recognized as a major issue in developing nations (including India), and there are active programs by Mr. Wine and Cheese going on.
From the 2010 report

This report was prepared as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to review the history of tuberculosis (TB) control in India, to assess the impact of the TB programme on the epidemiology of tuberculosis in India, and to outline directions for future progress.

The challenge is now to sustain the existing DOTS-based programme while introducing all components of the new Stop TB strategy, including services to address TB/HIV, treatment for multidrug-resistant TB, strengthening laboratory services, and integrating TB services in all health facilities of both the public and private health-care sectors. The effectiveness of the TB control programme is likely to increase further with the focussed efforts being undertaken by the Government of India in strengthening the primary health-care system under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM).

So no, they is not trying to call India an AIDS hotspot and removing focus from real issues. WHO and others are working on epidemic eradication in many developing nations. They do not always do a good job, make mistakes many times, and are often underfunded.

I feel Mr Gupta, has joined the tribe of people who consider any negative news on the country as an affront. There are negative news and articles about every country. Even USA. Thats the purpose of news. Bad news travels fast. India is not some holy cow immune from this.
On the subject of disease, Indian cities are well placed for epidemics. In recent memory we have had the bubonic plague epidemic, Swine Flu (killed 2000 in Rajasthan), Tuberculosis, Cholera.... the list goes on.
So the alarm bells were right. Without any action we would have gone down the path of spanish flu (if this epidemic has the same fatality rate l, but we still do not know).

The criticisms towards are coming in mostly from the point of view of lack of adequate testing and lack of masks for doctors.
This criticism is not some enemy of India conspiracy but a valid criticism leveled towards many other countries, including UK, USA etc.,

In a way I feel its a good thing that alarm bells were rung, doom and gloom was predicted and the government acted to control this epidemic. Places doing a "free run" are not doing very well, look at Brazil : https://www.worldometers.info/corona...ountry/brazil/