[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by Safety is Param

Here is the latest from covid19india.org

Sir, is there any reason that makes you doubt these numbers? Can you pls share? Apologies if I inferred your post incorrectly.

Don't see anything in the news yet. Thank you.

Thank you for sharing the updated figures.

All, The point of my question is - are our figures too low to be correct. The GoI may be publishing what it knows but it seems a little unusual that out of the top 10 most populous countries only Mexico is below us. I believe the lower figure is a function of the lack of testing in India and therefore we simply don't know. With the over crowding we have, the mass migration forced on the poor due to the zero notice lockdown with no preparation, it seems ironical that our numbers are so low. If we say that this is the ambient temperature effect then far far far smaller warm climate countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Ecuador, Israel, Philippines are reporting far larger numbers. Something doesn't add up. I don't know the answer only the question.

[saisree]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

a game which USA started anyway.

Don’t understand this. You mean to say USA is trying to export the virus to China? Authentic?

[vibbs]

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

What is everyone else doing so different? We're sitting in a country of 1.3 billion nodding our heads at ~1000 confirmed cases and somehow thinking what's brutalizing everyone else is passing us by.

China, at the very least, probably didn't have a reference point to quantify impact given it started there.

Sir, I believe you are quite right. Blaming China for everything that went wrong in this case is a bit Naive in my opinion.

Yes there was a delay in accepting at first. But we got to understand like you rightly said that they did not have a reference point. How many deaths due to unknown viruses does it take for our own government to take note? A cursory glance at deaths due to unknown fever in different parts of our country will give us an idea.

That notwithstanding, we need to understand that the first countries to be impacted outside China were Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and other South east Asian nations.

The fact that the outbreaks in these regions pale in comparison to the bloodbath in Europe is a testimony to the fact that the developed world messed up big time. For a long time they thought this is an Asian problem and took note only once it arrived at their shores.

If China is solely to be blamed for this mishap, we would have seen highest numbers after china itself in Japan, South Korea et al.

This is proof that even after the mess up in China, the world got time to act. Some people acted, some just did not.

[rdst_1]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Thank you for sharing the updated figures.

All, The point of my question is - are our figures too low to be correct.

Unless you test everyone, one is never going to get the real numbers. Also, the numbers, whether of confirmed cases or number of deaths are rising and can definitely explode if we don't take quarantining or testing seriously.
The nature of the virus is that it takes it's own sweet time and hence the cases rise suddenly and exponentially which makes it look like an explosion. For example, Switzerland reported 235 deaths in a single day (today) out of their total deaths which are just 257.
The stat I look at is deaths/million of population. That stat makes more sense to me because it assumes everyone has the virus and hence takes away the issue of low or high testing. The current value is 4 for the whole world whereas it is 166 for Italy and 140 for Spain.
I am not gonna look at China for which the value is 2, but let's look at S.Korea for whom the value is 3. That shows us that both testing and quarantining are most definitely effective. However, for India, I would like to wait for at least 2 more weeks to really understand whether the quarantining was a success or not or whether this was a futile exercise.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by rdst_1

The stat I look at is deaths/million of population. That stat makes more sense to me because it assumes everyone has the virus and hence takes away the issue of low or high testing. The current value is 4 for the whole world whereas it is 166 for Italy and 140 for Spain.

However, for India, I would like to wait for at least 2 more weeks to really understand whether the quarantining was a success or not or whether this was a futile exercise.

Excellent points on both.

[SilentEngine]

The numbers are still low in our country, and only plausible reason is that testing coverage is very low. Numbers have been accelerating in last few days. The are some WhatsApp messages circulating around which claim the lockdown has helped already to slow down the spread by using percentage numbers to justify the argument. This is not the time to get complacent.

As an example, another country which has still low numbers is Japan, again owing to low testing coverage:

https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronav...ths-quarantine

[nasa_hubble]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Thank you for sharing the updated figures.

All, The point of my question is - are our figures too low to be correct. The GoI may be publishing what it knows but it seems a little unusual that out of the top 10 most populous countries only Mexico is below us. I believe the lower figure is a function of the lack of testing in India and therefore we simply don't know. With the over crowding we have, the mass migration forced on the poor due to the zero notice lockdown with no preparation, it seems ironical that our numbers are so low. If we say that this is the ambient temperature effect then far far far smaller warm climate countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Ecuador, Israel, Philippines are reporting far larger numbers. Something doesn't add up. I don't know the answer only the question.

I only have a question to offer you as an answer. If the government is fudging the data and you suspect our symptomatic cases to be lot higher, then why our hospitals are not flooded with sick patients having symptoms of COVID-19?

[joe1980]

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

What is everyone else doing so different? We're sitting in a country of 1.3 billion nodding our heads at ~1000 confirmed cases and somehow thinking what's brutalizing everyone else is passing us by.

I don't know what you mean by this!

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

China, at the very least, probably didn't have a reference point to quantify impact given it started there.

I do not buy this. It was evident that the Chinese Ophthalmologist who raised this in December 2019 referring to this new virus SARS like was reprimanded and probably punished (who knows). We know that there was a SARS outbreak earlier in 2003. So there was indeed a reference point to quantify and alarm the world / WHO about this!

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

How about everyone else who truly turned this global by doing nothing once we did find out and sitting on our hands, some even with months of advance notice of what's coming, until things started turning towards the worse?

Everyone has a collective responsibility to handle this as it is a Pandemic now. My point is China could have done much better when they knew that this was an Epidemic (given the virus is SARS like and it happened already in 2003).

Watch this video till the end to connect the dots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYFBTMP5Vts

[vivek95]

Originally Posted by vibbs

How many deaths due to unknown viruses does it take for our own government to take note? A cursory glance at deaths due to unknown fever in different parts of our country will give us an idea.
.

I am not an epidemiology expert but let me state my observations on this one.

Nipah virus unlike Sars-Cov2 was not a new virus, agreed. It's origin is traced back to 1999. The first index case in Kerala was reported on May 2, 2018. And the tiny state, that is touted for its best health machinery in the entire country reported to WHO as early as 25th May 2018. The number of suspected/confirmed Nipah cases were extremely less as compared to COVID-19. Also, I never came across any news where any Doctor or journalist was silenced in Kerala for revealing about the Nipah virus outbreak.

The index case of Sars-Cov2 in China's Wuhan was traced back to November 17, 2019. Thereafter, everyday around 4--5 such cases of flu/penumonia due to unknown origin were reported, if we go by various news reports. And if I am not wrong, China reported this to WHO only in the last 4 days of December 2019. Rest is well known to everyone.

All I can say is, kudos to the health ministry of Kerala.

--Dr. Vivek

[Sankar]

In one of my older posts I had posted a link to a case of two dogs which contracted Covid19 from their infected owners in HongKong. One of the dogs is now dead, but authorities are not saying it is due to the ncov2 virus because the dog turned negative later. It is also mentioned that the owner did not allow autopsy on the dog so the real cause of death is not ascertained.

https://www.livescience.com/coronavi...nsmission.html

Coming to the present, a Cat tested positive for Covid19 in Brussels Belgium.

"The cat had diarrhea and breathing trouble, and researchers subsequently found the novel coronavirus in her feces. As of Saturday, both cat and owner were reportedly doing well."

https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/...5bc?ri18n=true

[yd_gli]

Originally Posted by nasa_hubble

I only have a question to offer you as an answer. If the government is fudging the data and you suspect our symptomatic cases to be lot higher, then why our hospitals are not flooded with sick patients having symptoms of COVID-19?

I have had the same question in my mind for a few days now on the lack of patients at hospitals. I don't think the government is fudging data. But here are a few possibilities:
- the pain/misery threshold for Indians is very high when it comes to visiting hospitals. I know a few people who over the last month had all the symptoms for covid19 but never went to the hospital or got themselves tested since the local physician didn't think they needed to. They all recovered but that brings me to the second point.
- the average Italian patient is 69 years old and even then only 47% needed hospitalization. Move the median age lower for India and the %age will drop further to ~ 30%. Majority in India will probably not need hospitalization in any case.
-let's say the Indian government is off by a factor of 20. That makes it 20k infected. Given the size of India and the poor data reporting from private hospitals, 30% of these patients visiting hospitals will probably be a blip on the radar and nothing else.
To make things complicated, it is suggested that Italy had an undected community spread for weeks before the health system got inundated.

[Chetan_Rao]

Originally Posted by joe1980

I don't know what you mean by this!

We have a case count of ~1000 after nearly 3 months of knowing about this, and we haven't started any sort of mass testing even in small pockets, say prioritizing testing for trained healthcare workers who we absolutely need to keep healthy and isolate as necessary because they're irreplaceable as a workforce at short notice. Plenty of parallels in the rest of the world, whether developed nations or developing.

Did China suppress everyone else's numbers too?

It was evident that the Chinese Ophthalmologist who raised this in December 2019 referring to this new virus SARS like was reprimanded and probably punished (who knows). We know that there was a SARS outbreak earlier in 2003. So there was indeed a reference point to quantify and alarm the world / WHO about this!

You realize that makes the global response look worse, not better?

Pathogens from the same family don't necessarily all behave the same way, so no, the current virus would still need bench-marking of its own. If our first knowledge of this traces back to Dec 2019, we can speculate all we want about the whistle-blower but it doesn't change the fact that also meant everyone outside China had more time to chart a course of action, not less. It will be April 2020 in less than 2 days, what's our explanation for the intervening period, even with China's blame factored in for keeping it hidden till the time info got out?

Even if we can unanimously agree than the origin can be blamed on China, who are all of us outside China going to blame our individual nations' and collective global reaction to the situation on?

P.S. It will soon be time to make similar videos on a global scale.

Originally Posted by nasa_hubble

...why our hospitals are not flooded with sick patients having symptoms of COVID-19?

How do we know we don't? The illness shares symptoms with common flu and other non-critical diseases, so how do we know a lot of these people getting treated, or self-medicating at home for these symptoms, aren't infected?

Not being infected, and not knowing it, are two entirely separate things. A lot of us suspect it's the latter (only one way to confirm, and it isn't widely available). We'll find out soon enough once people move beyond mild(er) symptoms.

[Red Liner]

Originally Posted by vivek95

The index case of Sars-Cov2 in China's Wuhan was traced back to November 17, 2019. Thereafter, everyday around 4--5 such cases of flu/penumonia due to unknown origin were reported, if we go by various news reports. And if I am not wrong, China reported this to WHO only in the last 4 days of December 2019. Rest is well known to everyone.

All I can say is, kudos to the health ministry of Kerala.

--Dr. Vivek

I really give two hoots to what anyone else here says, but China's government has to be brought to books at the international court of justice and at the UN and penalised tremendously and Xi has to go.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by saisree

Don’t understand this. You mean to say USA is trying to export the virus to China? Authentic?

Absolutely not. Kindly read the whole sentence...

This is nothing to do with blame, a game which USA started anyway.

[vibbs]

Originally Posted by vivek95

I am not an epidemiology expert but let me state my observations on this one.

Nipah virus unlike Sars-Cov2 was not a new virus, agreed. It's origin is traced back to 1999. The first index case in Kerala was reported on May 2, 2018. And the tiny state, that is touted for its best health machinery in the entire country reported to WHO as early as 25th May 2018. The number of suspected/confirmed Nipah cases were extremely less as compared to COVID-19. Also, I never came across any news where any Doctor or journalist was silenced in Kerala for revealing about the Nipah virus outbreak.

The index case of Sars-Cov2 in China's Wuhan was traced back to November 17, 2019. Thereafter, everyday around 4--5 such cases of flu/penumonia due to unknown origin were reported, if we go by various news reports. And if I am not wrong, China reported this to WHO only in the last 4 days of December 2019. Rest is well known to everyone.

All I can say is, kudos to the health ministry of Kerala.

--Dr. Vivek

Doctor, I don't mean to say China did not delay. They did. But pinning all blame solely on the delay is in my opinion Naive.

We have seen countries that got hit before, handled the crisis much better than what Europeans and Americans have done. So there must be something that these countries did which the developed world did not.

I don't want to regress, but for every Nipah example in our country we have many unknown causes of fever taking lives that have not been solved yet and do not feature in WHOs outbreak news either. Ofcourse none of them turned out to be of Coronavirus scale.

In short, all I intend to say is that if we are willing to give a clean chit to Europe and US that saw a widespread outbreak in their region almost a couple of months after December end 2019, perhaps some benefit of doubt is due for China as well. Chinese did falter in their reporting, but what the developed world is facing is as much due to their inaction and lethargic response as it is to the blame we would want to fix on China.