[HN Gopher] Covid-19 may have killed nearly 3M in India, far mor...
___________________________________________________________________
Covid-19 may have killed nearly 3M in India, far more than official
counts show
Author : pseudolus
Score : 354 points
Date : 2022-01-10 11:40 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| m33k44 wrote:
| India desperately needs a public institution like the NHS of the
| UK!
|
| Few years ago my father died of ILD(Interstitial Lung Disease),
| as per the doctors. I had my doubts about the diagnosis, but I
| had no where to go to for second opinion. There is a private
| hospital syndicate in every city of India; no hospital goes
| against other hospitals in the same city; they will cover each
| others back because most of the hospitals have the same
| "consulting doctors". They just loot the patient's relatives by
| prescribing same drug but from different manufacturer. And if
| they realise that the patient is going to die, then the family
| members are pressured to take the patient home or elsewhere, this
| is to avoid "death count" on their register. I was literally
| asked to take my father home the day he died suggesting that
| "take him home, we will provide the ambulance and he will die on
| the way home so it won't be on anyone of us!"
|
| The medicine profession in India is not just joke, it is inhumane
| and lacks any value for humanity.
|
| India should have looked at some of the European countries when
| setting up it's healthcare, education and news media policy.
| Unfortunately the country has copied verbatim everything in this
| regard from the US!
| llampx wrote:
| The value of life is negative in India, unfortunately.
| evancoop wrote:
| Excess deaths will need to become the standard statistic used to
| compare nations. Otherwise, we'll be debating "deaths FROM vs.
| deaths WITH COVID" and the differing statistical definitions from
| nation to nation. Moreover, is a death from lack of access to
| medical care due to the collapse of a medical system a COVID
| death? Is a death of despair from isolation and unemployment a
| COVID death?
|
| My sense is, when the pandemic is analyzed historically, "excess
| deaths" will be the only salient statistic in the literature.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Excess deaths per capita, please.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Excess deaths
|
| Excess deaths are not just due to COVID.
| Jedd wrote:
| > Excess deaths are not just due to COVID.
|
| Can you clarify what you mean by this?
|
| What kinds of things might excess deaths be attributable to,
| and to what rate / ratio would you expect?
| kansface wrote:
| People are now skipping routine cancer screenings, check
| ups, and altogether avoiding any health care out of fear of
| catching covid. Its not hard to find stories of people with
| heart attacks not going to the hospital! Kids are missing
| routine vaccinations, etc. Drug overdoses are up - more
| deaths in SF are from ODs than Covid last time I looked.
| Dementia patients and those in nursing homes truly took a
| nose dive by completely separating them from human contact
| (they deteriorate rapidly with no stimulation). I imagine
| lots of people stopped exercising and put on loads of
| weight.
| zo1 wrote:
| Not OP. But it's becoming increasingly clear (to me, at
| least) that data about reality has been lost. And no amount
| of "statistics", "modelling" and accounting for confounding
| variables will get that data back. This applies to masks,
| lockdowns, vaccine effectiveness and treatment
| effectiveness.
|
| Even if we do get a reasonable set of that data back via
| statistical means, I personally wouldn't trust it. Too many
| things weren't tracked, people had incentives to fudge
| numbers, data-integrity and duplication issues, etc. As
| much as I know there are lots of incredibly smart and
| educated people working on this, I see most of this as
| people running around throwing spaghetti at a wall to see
| what sticks, some hoping to get paid for it, others hoping
| to save lives.
|
| Likewise for your question. We simply don't have data or
| knowledge about what people did or how they behaved
| differently that might have caused a non-covid death to be
| reasonably attributed to covid. Suicide rates, anti-social
| behavior of children not seeing people's faces, people
| hiding pro-active tests, dentists visits, hiding from
| leaving the house and getting depression, the list is huge
| and specifically _unconstrained_.
| oblio wrote:
| You can complain about everything in the world, but not
| about masks. Masks work, we've known they work since at
| least 1919. When worn correctly by large groups of people
| in risky environments (indoors, poor airflow), they
| greatly reduce transmission rates.
|
| Everything else, you can say stuff about, vaccines have
| side effects, we don't know if and how much they reduce
| transmission, treatments are in flux, but masks are a
| simple and obvious solution with almost 0 side effects.
| swader999 wrote:
| Masks with a decent seal work and studies with mannequins
| show this. But in real life, an airborne disease, massive
| gaps by the side of your nose, wet cloth, rules such as
| wear it to your restaurant table then take off to eat,
| it's a pathetic exercise at best.
| oblio wrote:
| Gee, I wonder if anyone thought of testing conditions
| similar to real life. Nah, nobody did, because everyone
| is stupid.
|
| https://www.mpg.de/17916867/coronavirus-masks-risk-
| protectio...
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8
|
| Even bad masks poorly worn are better than no masks, and
| the effect is statistically significant.
|
| Also reducing the areas in which there is unmitigated
| exposure is a good thing, not a bad thing.
| brigandish wrote:
| > Gee, I wonder if anyone thought of testing conditions
| similar to real life. Nah, nobody did, because everyone
| is stupid.
|
| No need for that, at all.
|
| From [1]:
|
| > A recent British Medical Journal review looked at six,
| fairly porcine, studies concerning mask-wearing and
| estimated an impressive 53% reduction in risk. But the
| single randomised controlled trial estimated the smallest
| effect: a reduction of about 18% (-23% to 46%) in Sars-
| CoV-2 infections. The "heaviest" studies, an analysis of
| US states and a survey of about 8,000 Chinese adults in
| early 2020, observed rather than experimented and its
| editorial highlights the risks of confounding variables
| influencing both wearing masks and infections and the
| impossibility of disentangling the effects of measures
| fluctuating simultaneously. Indeed, this review found an
| identical 53% reduction from handwashing.
|
| There is an introduction of Spiegelhalther and Masters
| given here[2]. It's well worth reading that BMJ article,
| btw.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2021/nov/28/i
| vermect...
|
| [2] https://statsandstories.net/media1/covid-by-the-
| numbers
| swader999 wrote:
| These are all muted by omicron that has an R7-R10.
|
| Sure, wearing a Helmut is safer but if you hit something
| at 90 km/hr does it matter?
| swader999 wrote:
| That study proves exactly what I said.
|
| It describes an ideal situation where people are wearing
| well fitting medical grade or better masks with a virus
| as transmissible as Delta.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| From the only randomised controlled study of masks...
| https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.long
|
| "The rates of all infection outcomes were highest in the
| cloth mask arm, with the rate of ILI statistically
| significantly higher in the cloth mask arm (relative risk
| (RR)=13.00, 95% CI 1.69 to 100.07) compared with the
| medical mask arm. Cloth masks also had significantly
| higher rates of ILI compared with the control arm. An
| analysis by mask use showed ILI (RR=6.64, 95% CI 1.45 to
| 28.65) and laboratory-confirmed virus (RR=1.72, 95% CI
| 1.01 to 2.94) were significantly higher in the cloth
| masks group compared with the medical masks group.
| Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97%
| and medical masks 44%."
| oblio wrote:
| Things vary wildly across the world but in most of Europe
| people aren't allowed to use cloth masks anymore, and
| haven't been for at least half a year.
|
| They have to wear either surgical masks or FFP2.
| Jedd wrote:
| > We simply don't have data or knowledge about what
| people did or how they behaved differently that might
| have caused a non-covid death to be reasonably attributed
| to covid.
|
| Which is somewhat tangential to my question.
|
| Disregard any formal attribution to COVID 19 as a cause
| of death - direct or indirect.
|
| Parent was suggesting _all excess deaths_ are not _just_
| due to COVID (directly or indirectly).
|
| Sensibly allocating excess deaths to different categories
| is really the question here, and I'm wondering what
| caveats we should be careful about.
|
| From a terribly abstract perspective, total excess deaths
| within a population, year on year, prior and then during
| a global pandemic, _should_ give us some useful
| baselines.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > Not OP. But it's becoming increasingly clear (to me, at
| least) that data about reality has been lost.
|
| Are you claiming that death counts are incorrect and data
| about deaths have been lost?
| zo1 wrote:
| Not death-counts, but definitely data _about_ the deaths
| yes. So detailed reasons for the death, specifics about
| the death that may be pertinent, their covid history
| prior to the death, how covid did or didn 't affect their
| behavior that may have caused the death, etc.
|
| Example: Are we keeping track of all the people that
| skipped a routine test because of covid lockdowns? And
| then, is there a subsequent record of that fact linked to
| every covid case of death? Or are we stuck modelling the
| correlation/overlap of those two data points because we
| track those statistics across populations separately?
| saalweachter wrote:
| Eh, I think we have enough variation in local responses
| that we'll be able to tease a lot of the data out with a
| reasonable degree of confidence.
|
| We're living in a world full of counterfactuals, with
| some places mandating -- and enforcing -- mandates on
| various public health measures rigorously, and other
| places not.
|
| The pandemic also has a time dimension. To the extent
| that excess deaths are from deferred treatment and missed
| testing, we expect them to get worse over time -- people
| missing a cancer screening in March 2020 shouldn't have
| resulted in excess deaths in April 2020, in the extreme.
| "Real" COVID deaths meanwhile we'd expect to follow the
| peaks and valleys of the infections.
|
| It will be a lot of work, but that's what grad students
| are for.
| bena wrote:
| But the vast majority would be.
| csours wrote:
| Sure. It doesn't matter at a national population level.
|
| ---
|
| Excess deaths is an epidemiological measure and should be
| used for epidemiological purposes - targeting a public health
| response.
|
| It seems like quite a few people have confused epidemiology,
| clinical care, and virology. Each of these fields can suggest
| data for the others, but can't speak definitively until the
| studies are actually done.
|
| For example, some have said that omicron is more mild than
| other variants; but it would be more correct to say that the
| average experience of omicron in the population is more mild
| AT THIS TIME.
|
| At this time, many people have been vaccinated or recovered
| from a previous infection, so without some very particular
| data, you cannot say that omicron is more mild.
|
| Edit:
|
| > you cannot say that omicron is more mild than another
| variant to any particular person in a clinical context.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The theory of the matter is that you take what's working
| and you apply it and discard what's not working. The
| practice of the matter is that if excess deaths goes up due
| to drug use increasing during lockdowns, the public health
| reaction is to increase lockdowns.
| naasking wrote:
| > Is a death of despair from isolation and unemployment a COVID
| death?
|
| Since that's driven by the response to COVID, I certainly don't
| think it should be, because the response is a choice which
| differs meaningful from a death by COVID infection or
| comorbidity. Teasing apart the deaths directly caused by COVID
| from those that indirectly led from our response to COVID is
| important for making these decisions in the future.
| donkeyd wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's still not a great comparison. Countries
| with lockdowns had less deaths from things like other
| illnesses, traffic accidents, et cetera.
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| It's still a better metric than some guy on science.com
| effectively saying "I feel this number should be much higher"
| lordnacho wrote:
| The point is to capture all those effects together. People
| who died in car crashes after 9/11 grounded all the planes
| have in some sense died from the terrorist attack, even
| though nothing at the scene suggests it.
|
| Same with covid, if someone dies from undiagnosed cancer due
| to lockdowns, they have been affected by covid in one way or
| another. That's what the "with or from" comment is about, we
| get past it by looking at the total effect.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Same with covid, if someone dies from undiagnosed cancer
| due to lockdowns, they have been affected by covid in one
| way or another.
|
| If a death would have been prevented by just not having
| lockdowns, then tallies that it's included in being high
| shouldn't be used to justify having lockdowns.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Excess deaths - and maybe a QALY-loss estimate - are the only
| way to "score" the pandemic and different countries' response
| to it, but I suspect there will be a lot of writing on "actual
| COVID deaths" versus "deaths from hospitals deferring treatment
| due to COVID surges" versus knock-on deaths attributable to the
| pandemic, lockdowns, unemployment.
|
| We're getting so much interesting data out of this pandemic,
| both biological and sociological. Which public health measures
| were effective? Which ones were acceptable to different
| populations, and why? How does misinformation flow? How well
| can governments control the narrative?
|
| There are going to be PhD theses built on this for the next
| ten, twenty years.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Deaths from hospitals differing treatment are also a great
| assessment of COVID impact on society. If COVID hardly hit a
| region, then they didn't need to delay surgeries. If COVID
| ravaged through the country, likely the hospitals were
| impacted and had to delay surgeries. All excess death is
| relevant.
| q1w2 wrote:
| Right, but it's important to distinguish excess deaths
| caused by covid and covid hostpital impacts vs excess
| deaths caused by lockdown behavioral changes.
|
| Lockdowns and mandates are something a region can
| instrument independently, and we now have lots of data to
| assess the benefits/impact of different degrees and types
| of lockdowns and mandates in jurisdictions that were
| impacted by the same number of new covid cases.
| [deleted]
| DanHulton wrote:
| I've taken to calling them "Pandemic Deaths", ie deaths caused
| by the pandemic, regardless of specific source. Makes it a
| little harder to split hairs.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Then that should include suicides from lockdown inflicted
| mental distress
| jeffbee wrote:
| You mean it should include a negative adjustment for the
| fact that suicides fell in 2020 in the U.S.?
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf
| the_doctah wrote:
| >Rates for persons aged 10-34 were higher in 2020 than in
| 2019, whereas rates for persons aged 35 and over were
| lower.
|
| I highlighted the important part.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > only the 5% increase for those aged 25-34 (from 17.5 to
| 18.3) was significant.
|
| Hope that helps.
|
| It's _super_ weird that people try to focus on this when
| the larger failure of policy is that car crash deaths
| were up more than 18%, resulting in far more absolute
| deaths. You are talking about a change of 320 deaths
| while the car crash increment was 3140 additional deaths.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Australia had a severe nationwide lockdown and suffered
| negative excess mortality in 2020
| flerchin wrote:
| It does
| tinus_hn wrote:
| And then if it turns out that lockdowns actually cause deaths
| due to youth suicides, they'll be swept under the rug and be
| used to excuse more lockdowns.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| An inconvenient truth.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-
| attempts-...
| loudmax wrote:
| The Economist's excess death tracker is online here:
| https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
|
| The article was last updated in October 2021, but the data in
| the charts is current insofar as it's available.
|
| Their methodology is posted on Github here:
| https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-track...
|
| They get their data from the World Mortality Dataset
| (https://github.com/akarlinsky/world_mortality). They claim
| their modeled baselines fit a linear trend for year, to account
| for long-term increases or decreases in mortality, and a fixed
| effect for each week or month up to February 2020.
|
| I haven't dug into the details of the methodology but it
| appears very sensible. Of course it's very dependent on overall
| mortality rates having been accurately reported to begin with.
|
| If the Economist keeps this this chart going long enough, we
| should expect that in countries worst affected by covid, future
| mortality rates will fall below the expected baseline. The
| simple (if somewhat morbid) logic being that in those places
| the most vulnerable people will have already died.
| xeromal wrote:
| I find it strange China isn't in this list.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It doesn't sound like anyone really knows how many people
| exist or are born or die in India, so it's not clear that the
| Economist's attractive presentation of the data could have
| any real basis in India, without a primary data source.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Evidently the underlying dataset doesn't include China.
| tersers wrote:
| You are in luck, they just updated it today.
| tarunupaday wrote:
| I do not see any data about India
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| It's not in the table but there is a mention in the text
| below:
|
| > In India, for example, our estimates suggest that perhaps
| 2.3m people had died from covid-19 by the start of May
| 2021, compared with about 200,000 official deaths.
| hnbad wrote:
| I remember when I saw the first reports about Covid in India in
| 2020 locals on social media were suggesting that despite the
| reported mass deaths the unofficial numbers would likely be
| significantly higher because only people who actually made it to
| hospitals were counted and many people dying in rural/poorer
| areas (where tests or even medical care weren't widely available)
| were cremated without a diagnosis.
|
| I'm not at all surprised to see that this may still be the case
| now a year an a half later.
| bigodbiel wrote:
| For >70% seroprevalence, with IFR 0.5 (best estimates pre-
| vaccination), and a population of 1.4 billion would still give
| around 5 million deaths. I would expect India's IFR baseline to
| be lower than average western (younger population, low obesity),
| but surges would lead to healthcare collapse raising it.
| [deleted]
| Aldipower wrote:
| India: 3,000,000 / 1,300,000,000 = 0.002307692307692308
|
| Of course a lot and too much.
|
| Germany: 120000 / 83000000 = 0.0014457831325301205
|
| But why arguing with absolute non-comparable numbers without
| context? Click rate?
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| I would argue this is neither a lot nor too much. That's my
| personal opinion. But I would use this statistic as an argument
| to relax a little and allow for controlled spread of Omicron
| and have the pandemic become endemic finally.
| [deleted]
| cosenal wrote:
| The point of the article is how India cases are very under-
| reported. If it was just about officially reported death rate
| of the country normalized by population, as you did in your
| math, there wouldn't be an article at all.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Yes, I understand, my point is, why putting this absolute
| number into the article title?
| shagie wrote:
| Germany has reported 114K deaths. India has only reported
| 484K deaths.
|
| There are other aspects to the underreporting of deaths -
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm5154
|
| > The analyses find that India's cumulative COVID deaths by
| September 2021 were 6-7 times higher than reported
| officially.
|
| From back in June - https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandso
| da/2021/07/20/1018438...
|
| > The analysis, from the Center for Global Development, a
| think tank in Washington, D.C., looks at the number of
| "excess deaths" that occurred in India between January 2020
| and June 2021 -- in other words, how many more people died
| during that period than during a similar period of time in
| 2019 or other recent years.
|
| > Drawing death data from civil registries and other
| sources, the report came up with three estimates for
| undercounts. The conclusion is that between 3.4 and 4.7
| million more people died in that pandemic period than would
| have been predicted. That's up to 10 times higher than the
| Indian government's official death toll of 414,482.
|
| The story isn't about the number of deaths itself but
| rather the underreporting of deaths. Another possible title
| would be "Covid-19 believed to be underreported by 6-10x in
| India" - though that fails to capture the sheer toll of the
| death and isn't as eye catching.
|
| There is nothing to compare it with in Germany (for
| example) because the number of unreported covid-19 deaths
| is likely very small in comparison to the totals.
| taeric wrote:
| I think the question is fair on "why isn't the headline
| that actual deaths are over 6 times reported deaths?"
|
| That is, the absolute number is big, but it is not that
| that is the story. The story is how that big number
| relates to another number.
| birksherty wrote:
| Because people died and it's data.
| tgv wrote:
| Because it's a pretty high number. It shows that if an
| epidemic breaks out in an where it cannot be controlled,
| the toll is high. If Andorra would have denied the
| existence of COVID and refused to take measures, the
| numbers would be a bit lower.
| rep_movsd wrote:
| Wow Look at China! 1000 people died on April 15th, 2020 and then
| not a single death.
|
| Imagine such an advanced country, we should all move there or
| adopt their form of government!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873938
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Enough information leaks out of China that we can be fairly
| confident they at least don't have massive waves of deaths and
| overwhelmed hospitals.
|
| Totalitarian governments _can_ do better in this sort of
| scenario, for a while. It 's not a great trade-off 99.9% of the
| time, but there's a reason wars, disaster recovery, etc. tend
| to be fought by executive fiat rather than democratic decision
| making.
| codeflow2202 wrote:
| The only source of their stats is the party. It's part of
| their politics to downplay the bad and show off the good.
| They have nothing to gain by showing to their population that
| they are weak in front of this pandemic.
| tzs wrote:
| There are only 22 countries that do not have diplomatic
| missions to China.
|
| The remaining countries have embassies, counsel general
| offices, and similar throughout China. Beijing has 172
| embassies plus missions from the EU, African Union, Arab
| League, and the UN.
|
| 24 other cities throughout China have counsel general
| offices [1].
|
| All of these have extensive contact with the local
| populations, and all of them have secure means of
| communication back to the home governments.
|
| There are a large number of foreigners from a wide variety
| of countries living in China for business reasons, or
| visiting China for business reasons, who have extensive
| contact with the local populations.
|
| The party might be able to control the domestic flow of
| information sufficiently to keep their own people in the
| dark, but for events with wide impact such as epidemics and
| pandemics they can't stop other governments from finding
| out through reports from all those foreigners.
|
| Conclusion: either China's death rates _are_ actually quite
| low from COVID, or they are not and the other governments
| (including the US, all of the EU, Japan, Australia, Korea)
| know this but are keeping it secret themselves as are the
| numerous non-government workers who regular are in China.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diplomatic_missio
| ns_in...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The only source of _statistics_ is the party, but that 's
| not the only source of _information_. If the healthcare
| system was collapsing in China due to COVID megadeaths, we
| 'd know.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Whether the healthcare system "collapses" has to do with
| how hard it actually tries. We did get reports early on
| that the crematoriums were working far more than usual.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > We did get reports early on that the crematoriums were
| working far more than usual.
|
| That's precisely what I'm talking about, right? That
| information got out; the world was able to see
| information indicating a higher death toll that official
| numbers implied, despite attempts to keep it quiet.
| rei_ayanami wrote:
| Yeah, communism for the win, we want more Tienanmen square
| stuff and concentration camps for certain minority groups.
| glogla wrote:
| I think you missed the sarcasm.
| godmode2019 wrote:
| "He also focused on the large cities, where death rates may have
| been lower than in the countryside"
|
| Didn't the WHO estimate 120 million people would die in
| developing countries of hunger brought on by economic conditions
| of the pandemic.
|
| This seems to meet the criteria. They also said delta was much
| more deadly than alpha, 2021 being more deadly than 2020, ie
| hunger, malnutrition, my guess is 2022 will be more deadly than
| 2021. Due to the same reasons, mainly in the country side, poorer
| communities.
|
| The average age of registered people in India is 26, you should
| expect a low IFR in such a population living in a warm climate,
| with limited air conditioning - where you see summer spikes in
| Texas for example.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Of course the daily stats aren't accurate. Not nearly so, I
| believe. Some nations have better capability for testing. Some
| nations have people wealthy enough to get tested or provide free
| testing, whereas others do not. In some places, knowledge of
| COVID-19 does not exist.
|
| Does / did anyone really believe that the USA is the leading the
| death count, when countries with more questionable infrastructure
| and huge populations like China and India exist?
| rhino369 wrote:
| I would never trust the Chinese government to publish accurate
| numbers. But their society definitely kept pre-Omicron covid
| cases really low. Their infrastructure to identify and
| quarantine cases is much better than the US's or Europe's since
| they are an authoritarian state.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| China has pretty good testing infrastructure that they use
| aggressively when any cases are found. Surely the residents of
| Xi'an are being swabbed every week now.
|
| But China is much more developed than India.
| makomk wrote:
| China has pretty propaganda-heavy testing infrastructure -
| they do heavily publicised one-off mass testing of entire
| cities which the state media points to as proof of their
| superiority over other countries which aren't doing that, but
| outside of that testing appears to be extremely questionable.
| They've had pretty astounding incidents like not testing
| people hospitalized with Covid symptoms in the one province
| which had known, uncontrolled community spread at the time at
| a point when Western countries (or at least the UK) were
| systematically testing anyone who went near a hospital. And
| of course testing entire cities is going to miss recently
| infected people and doesn't help find cases outside the city
| boundary, which is likely more common than they let on...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It's not just propaganda though. Anyone who has family or
| friends in China has heard gripes about how much testing
| they are being subject to. You can't really dismiss them as
| being brainwashed with the party line or something. China
| has a zero COVID policy, and they are extremely aggressive
| about that. I guess you are arguing that these policies are
| just applied to the cities and not the villages?
| hereforphone wrote:
| Does China have a motivation to be honest about their
| figures? Did they a year ago, or two years ago? Even if
| they're honest now, no doubt they were first hesitant once
| the cat (COVID-19 in this case) got out of the bag?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| China isn't North Korea, there are plenty of information
| paths between China and the rest of the world that doesn't
| go through the party. The party has motivation to be honest
| in so much that if they weren't honest, it would be obvious
| very quickly that they weren't tame they'd lose face.
|
| Back when COVID first came out, local officials on the
| ground were hesitant to bring attention to what they
| thought was a minor problem at the time. Even when the
| deaths began piling up, they were still trying to hide from
| the central government, and even then, plenty of
| information was leaking to the outside, everyone knew
| something was up even if they weren't sure what it was.
| However, once the central government got involved, well,
| any chance of deception at the local level was off the
| table. The central government doesn't really have a boss to
| hide things from, so in that case, things work out for
| transparency (but, ya, if they thought they could hide
| something, they would be tempted to for face reasons).
| pradn wrote:
| In Egypt the minimum wage for public sector workers is EGP
| 2,400 per month. A rapid test costs about EGP 700. Are the case
| numbers accurate when even a rapid test costs as much as a
| third of one's monthly salary?
| geodel wrote:
| Yeah, but is it surprising? Government would like to put only
| confirmed cases in covid death and non-confirmed ones in 'other'
| category. Media would like to put unconfirmed cause of death in
| covid category and hence the higher number.
|
| Somehow there is this assumption that higher number would lead to
| outrage and cause changes for the better healthcare
| infrastructure. I for one can't not agree that with current per
| capita income level and tax revenues an order of magnitude
| improvement in healthcare infra is possible.
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| We have a post like this every month.
|
| What incentive does the country have to under report COVID
| deaths? Get some glorious trophy from the west on its stellar
| COVID management?
|
| Save face with people and continue winning elections? The people
| don't blame the government for covid.
|
| Not to mention, the numbers are reported independently by the
| states, ruled by very different political parties.
| Jedd wrote:
| > We have a post like this every month.
|
| I'm not sure that's true. And if it were to be true, I'm not
| sure how it speaks against the claims made in this article?
|
| > What incentive does the country have to under report COVID
| deaths? Get some glorious trophy from the west on its stellar
| COVID management?
|
| I don't think TFA is trying to establish what incentives an
| administration may have to try to demonstrate their
| administration was more effective than it actually was.
| (Though, having written that out loud ...)
|
| > Save face with people and continue winning elections? The
| people don't blame the government for covid.
|
| I admire your optimism regarding the passive objectivity of
| 'the people'.
|
| Generally, I'd expect a population (within any ersatz
| democracy) to evaluate the quality of its administrators based
| on their performance during a pandemic, and subsequently vote
| accordingly.
|
| > Not to mention, the numbers are reported independently by the
| states, ruled by very different political parties.
|
| How would you expect this to play out if every incumbent
| politician / political party in each state, was incentivised to
| downplay mortality rates from COVID19?
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| > And if it were to be true, I'm not sure how it speaks
| against the claims made in this article?
|
| I'm not sure how this somehow, every month, is "hacker"
| "news"
| toast0 wrote:
| > What incentive does the country have to under report COVID
| deaths? Get some glorious trophy from the west on its stellar
| COVID management?
|
| It's about incentives and costs at every level. If the person
| filling out the death paperwork writes covid, does that require
| more work than not writing covid (paperwork, cleaning, testing,
| etc)? Does it bring shame to their work, their colleagues or
| facility or community?
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| What about the incentives of the "scientists" doing this
| study?
| BhavdeepSethi wrote:
| Why don't you elaborate on that rather than posting a
| leading question. I don't understand what a supposedly bias
| scientist living in Canada has to gain from his analysis
| about India?
| herendin2 wrote:
| This pandemic literally started with local politicians and
| bureaucrats, in Wuhan, lying to their central government and to
| the media about its effects, and grossly under-reporting
| deaths. This accelerated the spread, or may even mean they
| missed a window of opportunity to stop the spread.
|
| It's obvious that officials have many incentives to downplay
| the impact, and dodge and shift blame. When local officials
| lie, their national government will probably repeat the lies,
| perhaps unknowingly
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > What incentive does the country have to under report COVID
| deaths? Get some glorious trophy from the west on its stellar
| COVID management?
|
| Local politicians may have other motives - there have been
| close links of COVID prevalence among the extreme poor / in
| slums [1], for example. Concealing COVID deaths may be an
| attempt to hide the fact that the government has failed to
| serve that community.
|
| Additionally, there may be fiscal impacts based on COVID
| classification - not sure what India in specific is doing, but
| for example, the US covers funeral costs for COVID deaths.
| Three million COVID funerals are _a lot_ of money.
|
| > Save face with people and continue winning elections? The
| people don't blame the government for covid.
|
| Oh yes they do. A large part of why Germany's Conservative-led
| coalition was shot down in last year's election was the
| handling of the coronavirus pandemic - incompetence on all
| levels of government as well as some conservative backbenchers
| taking nearly 50 million euros in sketchy mask deals [2].
|
| In contrast, _factually good_ management politics can earn
| historic landslide wins [3].
|
| [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06958
|
| [2]: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/bayern-lobbyregister-
| poli...
|
| [3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54519628
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| > Oh yes they do
|
| I should have been clearer. Indians don't blame the
| government for COVID as evidenced by election results
| everywhere in the country irrespective of the political
| spectrum. Even places where the incumbents lost, COVID was a
| non issue.
| 99_00 wrote:
| The incentive is obvious. And by looking at partisan media
| outlets you can see that the political machines take it
| seriously.
|
| When Trump was in power CNN had a covid death count being
| displayed 24/7. America's ranking in deaths was constantly
| mentioned.
|
| When he lost the election it was removed.
|
| 2021 saw more covid deaths in the US than 2020. Despite
| vaccines being available. This received almost no coverage.
|
| And now, in the US the cases and deatha in individual states is
| used for political gain by both sides. Especially when the
| states governor is seen as a possible political candidate.
| tombert wrote:
| > When Trump was in power CNN had a covid death count being
| displayed 24/7. America's ranking in deaths was constantly
| mentioned.
|
| CNN might be partisan but I don't know that this is a good
| example. In 2020 COVID was new, and people were all clamoring
| to see new updates about it. Trump being in office was (I
| think) somewhat incidental.
|
| In 2021, I think people are tired of hearing about COVID as
| much and as a result it didn't get the total 24/7 coverage as
| often. I remember a similar thing happening shortly after
| 9/11.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Not very surprised.
|
| An Indian expat living in NL, with parents living back home in
| India. My (retired, old) parents are afraid to get tested for
| COVID because they hear way too many incidents from their
| neighbourhood about "hospitals faking COVID test results just so
| that they can admit them for 4 days, administer expensive drugs,
| charge them some hefty bill, and send home". As stupid as it
| sounds, I could not force my parents to go and wait in the line
| to get COVID test, after he says "I believe I don't have COVID
| now. But if I go to the testing center that is so badly managed
| and understaffed where only people with obvious high level of
| COVID are brought to get official result, I will get COVID
| there!".
|
| Say what you will, but if the basic trust in doctors and
| healthcare is lost, how would people get tested, and how can you
| trust any statistics from there?!
|
| I'm ashamed, stupefied and angry at the same time.
| victor106 wrote:
| Most Hospitals in India are a really big scam.
|
| Many of my colleagues got sick in Hyderabad and from what I
| hear the hospitals directly sell drugs in black.
|
| Three of them got admitted to yashodahospitals
| (https://www.yashodahospitals.com/) and all three of them had
| to pay 5x the price for Remdesivir. The worst part is this was
| sold to them by the hospital management.
|
| Also, in India, when a doctor refers you to a diagnostic center
| for a lab test, the diagnostic center pays the doctor money in
| the form of a kickback.
|
| It's pathetic.
|
| I live in the US and the healthcare situation is bad but not as
| bad as in India. You would never want to get sick in India and
| visit a hospital there.
| nonamechicken wrote:
| If they are worried about hospitals, please request them to go
| to any of the independent labs that does covid tests. These
| labs are not connected to hospitals, they get paid only for the
| test, so doesn't matter to them whether the patient is positive
| or not. Many in my family did that.
|
| Also, when one of my family members got positive during the
| first peak, they went to a local government hospital (small
| town). They got really great care (including 4-5 doses of some
| injection worth ~10000 Rs per dose if I remember correctly,
| free food etc), and paid absolutely nothing.
| saimiam wrote:
| Does their city have at home testing where someone comes home
| to collect samples and results are emailed to the patient?
| triceratops wrote:
| If your parents don't have symptoms, or have manageable
| symptoms and are self-isolating, why bother testing? As long as
| they're fully vaccinated they've done their absolute best in
| this situation.
| nradov wrote:
| There are additional outpatient therapies that can be
| medically indicated depending on symptoms, risk factors, and
| locally approved care protocols. Most physicians will only
| prescribe those therapies based on a positive PCR test. Some
| of those therapies include monoclonal antibodies (less
| effective now with the Omicron variant) or a brief course of
| fluvoxamine.
|
| But for vaccinated patients with mild symptoms and no major
| risk factors, staying home and avoiding public testing sites
| is a reasonable approach.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I think the self-isolation part is key. If they're doing that
| as if they have Covid then I agree with you. And honestly, I
| think the commenters parents have a fair point about being in
| line with other likely Covid infected people.
| sabujp wrote:
| my in laws ordered a covid test, paid via paytm, the person
| came and took the sample, took the money and never returned
| results.
| programmer_dude wrote:
| Did you order a Thyrocare test by any chance?
| sabujp wrote:
| no, it was not a thyrocare, might have been a local
| contractor working for apollo. However, my mom went
| recently and for the return booked an at home travel test
| collection through
| https://www.metropolisindia.com/covid-19-test and was able
| to get an rt-pcr result in less than 24 hrs.
| keewee7 wrote:
| The anglophile Indian elite is surprisingly ignorant of what is
| going on in their own country. The anglophile Indian elite also
| controls many aspects of the country.
|
| This out-of-touch anglophile elite is the reason India is so
| dysfunctional, even more than other poor developing countries.
| api wrote:
| That's interesting because for a long time there's been this
| right-wing narrative about how "India benefited from British
| colonization."
|
| I suppose the British did introduce some technology and civic
| systems, but they also probably fractured the society and
| created a new kind of caste system.
|
| How much of today's seeming culture of corruption in India is
| a legacy of colonialism vs. how much was there already? I'm
| asking because I'm only looking from a distance.
|
| Also makes me wonder if the Chinese cultural revolution,
| while a disastrous failure on very many levels, might have
| erased a lot of the legacy of past colonialism... for the
| same reason that a gigantic natural disaster might lead to
| shiny new infrastructure after everything gets rebuilt.
| pratik661 wrote:
| This is an empirically accurate assessment. The priorities of
| the Anglophone elite (which dominate the IAS and other parts
| of the admin) are divorced from the priorities of the rest of
| the country. This manifests in issues akin to what they call
| "structural racism " in the US.
|
| Ie: budgeting priorities; India over budgets IITs and other
| elite institutions over other colleges and primary education.
| This results in a system with excellent top universities, but
| a steep drop in educational quality in tier 2 institutions
| (and very low educational outcomes in public primary and
| secondary schools).
|
| The government also focuses on agricultural price stability
| over farm income (ie banning agricultural exports during high
| prices).
|
| One can argue that the popularity of Modi and the other
| regional satraps (with language based sub nationalism) is a
| result of this institutional bias. Imagine how you would vote
| if you couldn't participate in the economy of your hometown
| because all the street signs/store names were in a language
| you couldn't read.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| >The government also focuses on agricultural price
| stability over farm income (ie banning agricultural exports
| during high prices).
|
| Given the farm law protests I don't know if you can pin
| that one on the anglophone elite.
| hiyer wrote:
| In my apartment complex in India, we have ~300 apartments and
| ~1000 residents. There have been over 70 cases of Covid here
| since the beginning of last year (including 15 as I type this)
| and only one of them was hospitalized - a 3 year old boy. All
| the others were quarantined and recovered at home. I don't know
| where your parents live, but what I've seen in Delhi, Bangalore
| and Chennai (I don't have first/second-hand knowledge of other
| places) is that hospitals refuse to admit you unless you
| absolutely need to be admitted.
|
| Edit - just to add, the kid mentioned above also recovered, but
| he was hospitalized for a couple of days with very high fever.
| maccard wrote:
| OPs point was that it doesn't matter what the hospitals are
| actually doing, if people don't trust them.
| hiyer wrote:
| True, but what I'm saying is there's no reason to mistrust
| the hospitals as I've not seen the alleged behaviour at
| all. Add to that the fact that you don't even need to go to
| a hospital to get yourself tested in the first place - in
| most cities you can get it done by a professional at home
| (though it's possible OP's parents live in a rural area
| where this facility is not available).
| genghizkhan wrote:
| The situation is far worse in smaller towns and cities in
| places like Bihar and UP. I remember hearing stories
| during the second wave (some of which I was able to
| confirm) about doctors not telling family members that
| their loved ones had passed away so as to be able to keep
| charging the family for continued hospital care. The loss
| of trust in the medical profession is very real.
| zabhi wrote:
| Can confirm. Have personally seen this in Patna, Bihar.
| foobarian wrote:
| I'm not from India and for the longest time it was
| tempting to think of India as one homogeneous place; but
| that is not what it's like at all. Isn't India enormous,
| with many quite different states and different levels of
| development? And bottom line, what percent of the
| population has access to good quality health services vs
| what the GP described?
| hannofcart wrote:
| This is exactly right. The disparity in the level of
| healthcare that you would get in an Indian state like
| Bihar vs that in a state like Kerala is similar to the
| difference you'd expect between Sub-Saharan Africa and a
| second world Eastern European country.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Even in the US, there's a segment of the population who
| are getting themselves killed by not getting vaccinated
| and then refusing to accept proper medical care at the
| hospital because they believe that COVID is a conspiracy
| and that medical practitioners are in on the scheme. They
| roll in 5 days after they start showing symptoms with low
| oxygen levels hoping to find a doctor who will prescribe
| ivermectin and vitamins to become self-fulfilling
| prophecies when doctors refuse to treat them with things
| that aren't approved or helpful.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Also in Europe. Death by ozonotherapy is real.
| maccard wrote:
| > True, but what I'm saying is there's no reason to
| mistrust the hospital
|
| That doesn't matter _if people don't trust the
| hospitals_. Whether or not there's a reason for it is
| insignificant.
|
| > as I've not seen the alleged behaviour at all
|
| As an aside, one anecdote doesn't mean that there's no
| reason to mistrust the hospital. I have elderly relatives
| in care homes, and I've not seen them abused. That
| doesn't mean there's not a problem with abuse in care
| homes here in the UK
| hiyer wrote:
| Well, it's not one anecdote - it's 70+ in my apartment
| complex and probably 100+ overall, but I get your point.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| it is one anecdote. Too many indians of privilege do not
| appreciate the fact that the majority of the country does
| not have that same privilege. Seventy people around you
| are all in the same social strata as you.
| hiyer wrote:
| Are you saying not being admitted to a hospital is a
| privilege? I would think that if a hospital did want to
| fleece someone, gainfully employed and insured people
| would be the best candidates rather than poor people who
| may not be able to afford the treatment.
| fragmede wrote:
| Trusting hospitals is the privilege being referred to.
| geodel wrote:
| Exactly right!. Some people take their own example from a
| privileged position and claim that everyone can get same
| treatment/service.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| Depends on where you are and how connected you are. In my
| locality (Bangalore) a bunch of people who tested positive
| got admitted to hospitals on 'precaution' even though they
| were all mild and advised to isolate at home.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Cumulative Deaths: Selected Countries and States (per 100K)
|
| https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-
| chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...
| laxmin wrote:
| I am a physician and my contribution to this conversation might
| not be appreciated, but here it goes. I work at a medical
| university with two medical colleges and a wide healthcare
| system and we were involved in the clinical trials for Covaxin
| (India's indigenous vaccine) as we as Covid care and
| immunisation. As a foot soldier, I am tired of fighting stories
| such as yours that raise doubt on statistics with anecdotes.
| The statistics maybe flawed, but we need some scientific rigour
| in decrying them. Not 'my parents said' stories.
|
| The anecdote about faking covid test results is plainly wrong.
| There is a mechanism for registering every PCR-RT test that is
| done along with the Aadhaar Unique Identity Number. The results
| need to be validated at different levels. These have been
| digitised. You can access your parents records online and
| verify and validate them too. All this is available on your
| mobile apps. The digitisation and workflow management make
| faking the results very difficult if not impossible.
|
| Hospitals are specially licensed to treat Covid. Not all
| hospitals can admit covid patients. It is not like every small
| clinic or hospital at the corner can simply admit patients. The
| total bill for ANY COVID RELATED ADMISSIONS are capped. The
| test fees are capped. There simply is not much incentive to
| fake results when the fees cannot be charged on whim.
|
| Of course, common people like your parents are fed
| misinformation by the social media (anti-vaxxers movement in
| the US) and a lot of fear about corporate profiting, big
| pharma, etc are the usual trope.
|
| Big pharma sure profits, but they profit most off such staple
| as baby powder and insulin. Their profits, data of efficiency
| on vaccines etc are under glare of scientific scrutiny, while
| their pain killers and opioids are where they don't get any
| investigation.
|
| The death rates on the other hand in India are under reported
| and there is a huge backlog that is being cleared right now.
|
| You may not believe it, but India's response to the pandemic
| has been nothing less than fantastic, given the sorry affairs
| of its health infrastructure. The mechanisms at every level
| worked satisfactorily. Were they miraculous? no.
|
| Efficient given the resources? Yep. It could have been worse.
| Far far worse.
|
| Edit. Oh I forgot to add... our hospitals lost a lot of money
| and our entire budget. We had to borrow to keep things running
| and are in the red for the next few years.
|
| So all this 'profiteering'... try running a hospital.
|
| Edit 2: The local administration commandeered our hospitals to
| set up Covid wards. Admissions were made electronically for
| hospital based observational wards. Food and medicines were
| made free for all the admitted patients. Also, Oxygen. Did I
| tell about the overtime payments to doctors, nurses and
| paramedical staff? All from the hospital funds. Patients paid
| nothing. Thats right. Nothing. Not a cent.
| nonamechicken wrote:
| I also appreciate your contribution. Unlike a lot of the so
| called NRIs, at least you chose to stay and do your part to
| make India better.
| gadders wrote:
| FYI for those wondering - NRI stands for Non-Resident
| Indian/Not Really Indian depending on how pejorative you
| want to be.
| nonamechicken wrote:
| [deleted]
| justicezyx wrote:
| Nicely explained.
|
| India should be an example of underdeveloped nation managing
| their covid situation. I'd like these policies to be
| documented and shared with UN med and shared with the world.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| large parts of this comment are an appeal to authority.
| India's response to the pandemic was an absolute disaster to
| the poor who incidentally make up the majority of the country
| and whose voices are rarely heard. This comment reeks of
| privilege and a lack of information about just how bad the
| indian medical situation is.
|
| As just one example, india STILL does not have a good handle
| on WHAT is killing people. Up until 2018, there were annual
| death surveys to determine the cause of death. Think about
| that - people go door to door and record verbal responses
| about how people died. That is how poor data in india is.
|
| These are not anecdotes and you should - respectfully - stop
| taking anything the indian government says at face value.
| obelix74 wrote:
| I agree with almost everything you say. Hospitals saved my
| MIL when she caught Covid in 2020 and had lungs affected. She
| was treated by a Doctor via video and only a nurse (hired a
| month ago, new to her job) doing the actual physical work.
|
| My only gripe is the shame that is attached to testing
| positive. The system kicks into extraordinary paranoia when
| someone tests positive. That is the reason why people refuse
| to be tested. My MIL did not test for weeks after she started
| coughing. Thankfully, my SIL traveled from the US forced her
| to test and admitted her.
|
| I understand the reasons and the struggle of the hospitals,
| but there is a bit of heavy handedness (nowhere near China, I
| must admit) that is scaring people away.
|
| I am thankful to the Doctors and nurses of India. They have
| saved at least two lives in my immediate family.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Hey. A lot to unpack here. But, first, THANKS!! for
| everything you do and the care you have for doing things
| right. Please don't take criticisms such as mine to mean that
| "everything is wrong and everyone is wrong" instead of its
| actuality where there is something wrong amidst several
| right.
|
| With that out of the way, I did try to explicitly say that my
| experience is not first hand and that it is of that from my
| parents and my frustration that they cannot get tested as
| often as I can in the NL, and trust the local healthcare
| setup as I do here.
|
| I for one am a lot relieved to hear from you that the digital
| systems are put to good use in verifying COVID tests,
| administration of vaccines, treatment, bills etc.
| Unfortunately, my parents concerns were still not addressed
| by these re-assurances. One may still test positive for
| COVID, but not really need the excessive medical procedures
| that the private hospitals/doctors do with monetary aims.
| Even worse, a doctor could simply admit someone for a couple
| of days and run all the tests only to come up and say after 2
| days and a bill of several thousand rupees, - "your covid
| test was negative", please be careful about your other
| problems we took care of.
|
| Secondly, if the regional testing centers or doctor's offices
| are as badly managed and under-staffed as my dad claims in
| his region, it is hard to trust the rest of the system to
| work, and not be scared of contracting covid just by visiting
| the test centre. I realise that India is big, diverse and
| unequal so it may not be the case where you are.
|
| One of the reasons, I am stupefied, angry and scared is also
| from your list...
|
| > our hospitals lost a lot of money and our entire budget.
|
| > Did I tell about the overtime payments to doctors, nurses
| and paramedical staff? All from the hospital funds. Patients
| paid nothing
|
| At least from a sample size of two (in a country with a
| couple billion people), it is not true. My uncle and aunt
| were hospitalised. for "mild" covid late last year, and came
| back home after 4 days with a fat bill, lot of frustration
| from defending against what they perceived as needless tests,
| and of course COVID. A private hospital could still keep the
| COVID cost to whatever regulatory maximum is, and still do
| absurd tests to milk the patient's insurance policies :-(
|
| The only way for this system to gain trust is transparency.
| For patients to take hospitals to court with trustworthy
| judicial system. However, here we are where India reports a
| few lakh people died, and researchers claim it is wrong by
| several orders of magnitude :-(
|
| I trust the sincere work of yours. But, we have a long way
| before that can be applied to the majority.
| steelstraw wrote:
| > Big pharma sure profits, but they profit most off such
| staple as baby powder and insulin. Their profits, data of
| efficiency on vaccines etc are under glare of scientific
| scrutiny, while their pain killers and opioids are where they
| don't get any investigation.
|
| Pfizer reported that earnings and sales more than doubled in
| the past quarter, and it raised its outlook for results the
| full year, thanks greatly to its Covid-19 vaccine.
|
| The vaccine business alone was responsible for more than 60%
| of the company's sales, as vaccine revenue rose to $14.6
| billion from only $1.7 billion a year earlier. The company
| said its Covid vaccine sales accounted for $13 billion of
| that revenue. Revenue outside of its Covid vaccine business
| was up a far more modest 7%.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/pfizer-
| earnings/inde...
|
| It's the largest part of the business now, and they are
| protected from downside: Under the PREP Act, companies like
| Pfizer and Moderna have total immunity from liability if
| something unintentionally goes wrong with their vaccines.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-
| effects-c...
| statguy wrote:
| > You may not believe it, but India's response to the
| pandemic has been nothing less than fantastic
|
| Come on, India was probably the only country in the world
| where there were dead bodies floating in rivers.
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57154564
|
| During the second wave in April-May 2021, which India had
| ample time to prepare for, hospitals just didn't have oxygen.
|
| https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/haryana/ex-envoy-dies-
| wait...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/21/india-
| hospit...
|
| States purposely undercounted their death tolls by vast
| amounts.
|
| https://twitter.com/deepakpatel_91/status/139341986118379930.
| ..
|
| That said some states like Kerala and Maharashtra managed the
| pandemic much better than others like UP and Bihar, so your
| experience could be based on one of the better performing
| states.
| nonamechicken wrote:
| The dead body floating thing happened in 1 or 2 states. My
| understanding is that dumping the body in Ganges is a
| cultural thing in some towns in those states. Someone from
| there told me that the older generation wants their body to
| be thrown in Ganges or buried on the shore so that they can
| get 'moksha'.
| statguy wrote:
| > The dead body floating thing happened in 1 or 2 states.
|
| Those were the worst hit states - UP and Bihar. What was
| observed during the second wave was not normal, something
| like that last happened in 1918 after the Spanish flu:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57068503 "This
| is not the first time bodies have floated up in rivers in
| India during a pandemic.
|
| "The River Ganga was swollen with dead bodies", the
| famous Hindi language writer and poet, Suryakant
| Tripathi, better known as Nirala, wrote about the 1918
| outbreak of Spanish flu in his village in a province
| which is now India's Uttar Pradesh state."
| nonamechicken wrote:
| While I agree that we shouldn't be seeing bodies in
| rivers, I am not entirely convinced if Covid and Spanish
| flu in India are comparable.
|
| The below links say bodies were found in many rivers, not
| just Ganga.
|
| "A report released by the sanitary commissioner in 1918
| later documented that it was not just Ganga that was
| clogged up with bodies, but all rivers across India."
|
| https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-
| natio...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic_in_India
|
| I don't think if scenarios such as below are happening in
| India, the leftist Indian media would stay silent.
|
| "India perhaps never saw such hard times before. There is
| wailing on all sides. ... There is neither village nor
| town throughout the length and breadth of the country
| which has not paid a heavy toll.
|
| Elsewhere, the Sanitary Commissioner of the Punjab noted,
| "the streets and lanes of cities were littered with dead
| and dying people ... nearly every household was lamenting
| a death, and everywhere terror and confusion reigned."
|
| https://theconversation.com/1918-flu-pandemic-
| killed-12-mill...
| nonamechicken wrote:
| Just found out that there was a similar incident back in
| 2015 where they found more than 100 dead bodies in Ganges
| in the same region. It was also reported by BBC. Now I am
| wondering if BBC conveniently forgot that and went far
| back to 1918, just so that they can compare India's
| current situation to Spanish flu?
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30808745
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnao_dead_bodies_row
| valarauko wrote:
| It is NOT a cultural practice in either of these states
| to simply "dump the body" in the Ganges. The tradition is
| to scatter the ashes in the river. Wood burnig open air
| cremations along the river bank is the norm, which takes
| several hours to reduce a body to ashes & bone fragments.
| Under usual conditions, a family member would remain with
| the pyre till the end, and would collect the bone
| fragments, mostly the next day. A lot of the leftover
| material is wood ash, which would be deposited in the
| river directly by the crematorium workers. Historically
| when resources have been tight & crematoriums overwhelmed
| by epidemics in the past, a family member would not be
| present, and unscrupulous crematorium workers would
| overturn partly cremated bodies in the river to ensure
| fast turnover, which is what seems to have happened in
| 2020. Desperate families might also inter the bodies
| directly in the river.
| nonamechicken wrote:
| Unless I misunderstood, someone I know from one of these
| 2 states recently told me their grandparent wanted to be
| disposed of like that. They said their generation or
| their parents don't believe in such practices.
|
| According to the below article, some communities do
| practice dumping body in Ganges.
|
| "He further informed that the practise of dead body being
| disposed in the rivers is prevalent in two particular
| stretches in central/eastern U.P. and the epicentre of
| which is in Kanpur Unnao region in central U.P and
| Banaras-Ghazipur area in eastern U.P"
|
| https://indianexpress.com/article/india/practice-of-
| bodies-b...
|
| There was also another incident in 2015 from the same
| Unnao region where they found more than 100 bodies in
| Ganges.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnao_dead_bodies_row
| valarauko wrote:
| Like I mentioned at the end of the initial comment, some
| families do indeed inter the bodies directly in the
| river, unable to afford the cost of cremation - this is
| also mentioned at the end of the wiki article you linked.
| This isn't new or surprising information. If there are
| communities that do this as a matter of routine, it's
| certainly not a significant source considering the 100s
| of millions who live along the river, where these
| community's dead mostly disappear without record into the
| river. For what its worth, it's certainly not a standard
| practice for the region. If bodies were present at
| significantly larger numbers in 2020, it suggests that
| either communities that do not traditionally practice
| interring in the river were doing it out of desperation,
| or that the traditional communities suffered
| significantly more deaths in the Delta wave, both of
| which are troubling concepts. The other possibility is
| that these were unclaimed bodies unceremoniously
| discarded by the civic administration, and the angle
| perhaps most appealing to those opposed to the current
| political dispensation.
|
| EDIT: regarding the anecdote about a grandparent asking
| for this, there's a lot of context we don't know. Rather
| than a traditional practice, it might simply be a comment
| based out of frustration about the expense & bother to
| the family for a "standard" funeral. I also have family
| from the region and I've never heard of this as a
| standard routine widespread practice. For the most
| disadvantaged communities, I can understand it.
| srean wrote:
| From the link that you pointed to
| Police officials of Unnao have offered an explanation
| that the bodies were of "people who were dumped
| in the river or buried on the banks after their
| families could not afford a proper cremation."
|
| You are trying hard to give the story a spin that dead
| bodies in the river in such numbers is nothing notable.
|
| Government contractors pressed into removing
| commemorative burial markers less they be counted by
| drones
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiLzIuMsnW0
|
| Let me find something in English to give context on these
| shallow graves
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q6hYu3EsC0 (will give
| viewers an idea of the mindboggling scale of the
| phenomenon)
|
| The following videos are not in English but you should be
| able to get a sense of the numbers by looking at them
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALO0VjfxXDA (pardon the
| annoying and unnecessary dramatization music)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DWWeOt4jWM
| kaesar14 wrote:
| To be fair, there is no country in the world operating with
| as little resources for as many people as India. The scale
| of administrating a pandemic response in India is mind-
| boggling.
| EngCanMan wrote:
| Thanks for the comment. Are you able to elaborate on the big
| pharma profits most on baby powder, insulin and pain killers?
| In the world I live in, they pushed those markets to the
| brink in the form of baby powder lawsuits, an epidemic of
| obesity and the opioid crisis. Also, have you looked into
| Pfizer's profits for 2021?
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/pfizer-
| earnings/inde...
|
| Edit: Baby Powder Lawsuit -
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/health/baby-powder-
| cancer...
|
| Obesity Worldwide - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-
| sheets/detail/obesity-and...
|
| Opioid deaths began with increased prescription -
| https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html
| saurik wrote:
| The way the comment you are responding to was written and
| explicitly quoted, and yet said the commenter was still
| trying to get their parents to go despite the multiple
| objections, made it to me sound like they were not claiming
| the things you are defending against but merely restarting
| them as something the parents said.
| jowdones wrote:
| Well, I for once, appreciate your contribution :)
| metb wrote:
| As a caring child of old parents, you should get your parents
| to NL where you can provide the best possible care for them,
| instead of letting them die in a place where they can't even
| get a COVID test done.
| nonamechicken wrote:
| > instead of letting them die in a place where they can't
| even get a COVID test done.
|
| I find it hard to believe that they are unable to get tests.
| During the peaks, it may have been true. Outside of that,
| there was no shortage. And we don't even need to go to
| hospitals for covid tests, there are plenty of independent
| labs. So, if their parents don't trust hospitals, they can go
| to those testing centers instead. Many in my family did that,
| that too 2-3 times (since they have to show negative RT PCR
| result for travel).
| rjv8 wrote:
| > I find it hard to believe that they are unable to get
| tests.
|
| Yes, he is probably just dissing his country to earn some
| "brownie points".
| MandieD wrote:
| If OP's parents are anything like my dad, they have zero
| interest in trading their warm homeland with its familiar
| language and culture for cold northern Europe. My dad would
| rather die in Texas than live in Germany, much as he enjoyed
| spending a week here this summer meeting his grandson.
|
| Older people have attachments other than their grown-up
| children.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| This. My parents have zero interest in spending their older
| years in a region that doesn't speak the language they
| know, colder, and has simply a different way of life than
| theirs not to mention their social circle.
|
| I wholeheartedly agree with their choice, and will do my
| best to help them where they are.
| rjv8 wrote:
| When millions are dying around them helplessly for want
| of good care, it seems cruel to let them fend for
| themselves in their old age, where they are scared to
| consult a doctor. If they are not willing to come to you,
| shouldn't you visit, and take care of them in these
| difficult times?
| nonamechicken wrote:
| I have been also wondering about this. My impression is
| that Tamil Nadu is much better in terms of health care
| compared to many Indian states. So, its strange that the
| parents are refusing to get tested. I am thinking that
| the parents are afraid to take public transport, and they
| don't want to burden their NRI son/daughter, so are
| making up excuses.
| srean wrote:
| Tamil Nadu, Kerala are significantly ahead in many key
| social and public health metrics. Were they not been
| compensated for by BIMARU (roughly, Bihar, MP, Rajasthan,
| Uttar Pradesh) states India would be competitive with
| first world standards. Unfortunately, the BIMARU states
| are the most populous and consequently controls the
| political fate of the rest of the country.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| The issue needs more context. It's not that they are
| fending for themselves in their old age. They are
| retiring in a village with a social circle they are
| comfortable with, and near a temple that they consider as
| pilgrimage, and have my sister who can reach them in
| couple of hours should there be a dire need.
|
| I'd visit if it would be of any help.
| blocked_again wrote:
| India compromises of 28 states. And all most all of them have a
| population bigger than New Zeland and some of them even have
| populations bigger than Brazil. Stop over generalizing your
| experiences with one state in India with entire India. What one
| experiences in Bihar or UP would be completely different from
| what one experience in Kerala or Goa for example. Be specific
| when talking about your experience in India.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| *is comprised of
|
| e: Muphry's Law got me. Comprises or is composed of is fine.
| blocked_again wrote:
| The point of language is to communicate. As long as you
| understand what the person is saying it's good enough. Once
| you start cherry picking on the syntax itself you are
| missing the actual point of why the language was invented
| in the first place.
| spiffistan wrote:
| Not when what you write (compromises) literally mean
| something radically different. That's not syntax.
| blocked_again wrote:
| You still understand the context right. What's the point
| of cherry-picking then?
| programmer_dude wrote:
| I don't think you understand what cherry-picking means.
| Also syntax, grammar and pronunciation are important.
| Understanding the context is not enough.
| nonamechicken wrote:
| I am guessing 'blocked_again' is from India, which means
| English is not their native language. Having to translate
| ones thoughts to a foreign language itself is hard, so I
| am with 'blocked_again' on this.
| programmer_dude wrote:
| I am from India too. People can learn.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| My mother is Pakistani if that makes people feel better.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's not as bad but it's not too different from other
| countries. Trust has evaporated in France, it didn't devolve
| into full on medical scam like what you describe, but the
| feeling is the same. People don't trust doctors or nurses and
| can't go willingly there (hence the limited vaccination rate).
| sofixa wrote:
| > hence the limited vaccination rate).
|
| Of _checks notes_ 73% of all eligible ( 5 years or older, all
| doses required ( booster included), and it was 12 years or
| older until yesterday, so there 's a huge drop since then).
| Many were forced by restrictions on everyday life, but still,
| that's certainly not "limited".
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| pps wrote:
| > Germany is also infamous in EU for its antibiotic resistant
| hospital bugs like MRSA.
|
| Never heard that this is a problem in Germany. Maybe because
| Poland is so much worse in regards to healthcare.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| https://www.scinexx.de/news/medizin/deutschland-bis-
| zu-20-00...
|
| https://www.zdf.de/verbraucher/volle-kanne/studie-zu-
| kranken...
|
| https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/sepsis-deutschland-
| kr...
|
| > Never heard that this is a problem in Germany. Maybe
| because Poland is so much worse in regards to healthcare.
|
| Then you are not well informed.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| > Intubations which aren't required and actually harmful and
| traumatizing.
|
| If this happened you certainly need get it to a lawyer. It is
| not much, but there are some way for recourse. You almost
| certainly have permanent damage after intubation.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| not me and not anybody I know. for what it's worth I don't
| know anybody who got any health issues from corona much
| less having to seek medical help.
|
| https://www1.wdr.de/daserste/monitor/sendungen/gefaehrliche
| -...
|
| https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article207311157/Co
| r...
| pfyra wrote:
| > Recently went to the doc for a normal cold.
|
| Why see a doctor for a regular cold? I've never heard anyone
| do that here in Sweden.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| because I need a doc's certificate to show my employer?
| pfyra wrote:
| Ok, I expected some kind of treatment. We do need the
| same certificate in sweden too, but only from the 5th
| sick day or so and I think they give certificates for
| regular cold over the phone.
| detaro wrote:
| Exactly to avoid the thing you are complaining about
| doctors are allowed to give those out over phone during
| the pandemic.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| they need the card at the beginning of a quarter. I was
| sick few days ago.
| detaro wrote:
| That is not a legal requirement, no. (not just for AUs,
| but a bunch of other things too it has been waived, again
| so that people don't need to go visit their doctors in
| person during the pandemic if it can be avoided. You can
| call a doctor you never went to for a sick note or a
| video consultation)
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| me ask woman on telephone of doctor that me coughing and
| headache - me need coming or this fine? she - yes you
| come must ... end of story
| morsch wrote:
| There has been an exemption to this rule for a while now.
| If your doctor doesn't do it, find one who does.
|
| As for hanging around in a waiting room, I agree it's
| insane on many levels. I usually ask very directly if
| it's okay to come back in a while instead of waiting
| around. Though my primary health care provider has people
| with a cold wait outside in their garden, which is much
| better if you come prepared.
|
| https://www.dak.de/dak/ihr-anliegen/corona-telefonisch-
| krank...
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Sometimes these days it feels like people forget cold
| exists. They catch a cold, get mild symptoms, and their
| first thought isn't "oh, I'm glad it was just a cold and I
| quickly recovered" but "wow, good thing I got vaccinated,
| these covid symptoms were really mild".
| sparselogic wrote:
| > We also have reports of systematic hospizalization where
| ambulant treatment would be possible and recommended.
| Intubations which aren't required and actually harmful and
| traumatizing.
|
| Source?
|
| BTW - it's only an anecdote, but a coworker in DE had a very
| different experience. After a week of significant symptoms
| but self-administered rapid tests coming back positive, they
| contacted the hospital for a checkup. Upon entry they
| received another rapid test: as soon as it came back
| positive, the hospital verified that their lungs were
| functional and then sent them home as quickly as possible.
| tonyjstark wrote:
| > This sounds similar to what is going on in Germany. We also
| have reports of systematic hospizalization where ambulant
| treatment would be possible and recommended. Intubations
| which aren't required and actually harmful and traumatizing.
| Same reason - financial incentives.
|
| Never heard of that in any of a variety of news sources I
| consume, without a credible source I heavily doubt it.
| Instead it seems like doctors currently urge people to take
| precaution (like getting vaccinated) to keep them away from
| hospital because of the work load.
|
| > Recently went to the doc for a normal cold. Was standing in
| a small unventilated corridor for half an hour with several
| coughing people.
|
| A lot of doctors now offer visits via video chat, if you need
| a sick leave for work it's often enough just to call the
| doctor and they send you the papers.
|
| True, there are problems with resistant bugs in hospitals and
| there are problems with testing facilities. The 'ashamed,
| stupefied and angry' feeling in Germany however can't be
| generalized like that: Some feel like they're living in a
| dictatorship because they have to wear a mask, some are angry
| because of the unclear and reactionary handling of the
| pandemic on a political level, some don't believe in science
| but follow alternative medicine or just think all of it is a
| big hoax, and there probably many more reasons people have.
|
| Overall, Germany still has a pretty good record on keeping
| people alive while never using really hard measures. What we
| really could use though is a more civil communication.
| bonzini wrote:
| > > We also have reports of systematic hospizalization
| where ambulant treatment would be possible and recommended.
| Intubations which aren't required and actually harmful
|
| > Never heard of that in any of a variety of news sources I
| consume,
|
| And I heard exactly the same about Italy from news sources
| that no one in their right mind would trust, which actually
| corroborates your point.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| https://www1.wdr.de/daserste/monitor/sendungen/gefaehrliche
| -...
|
| https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article207311157/Co
| r...
|
| also check interviews of Prof. Klaus Stohr - he mentions
| that regularly.
|
| > A lot of doctors now offer visits via video chat, if you
| need a sick leave for work it's often enough just to call
| the doctor and they send you the papers.
|
| they need my physical HI card every quarter ...
|
| > Overall, Germany still has a pretty good record on
| keeping people alive while never using really hard
| measures. What we really could use though is a more civil
| communication.
|
| Deaths per infections is relatively high compared to other
| EU countries. Again, check Prof. Stohr interviews.
| tonyjstark wrote:
| The WDR link discusses different opinions on intubation
| as well as the fincial incentives. It even mentions that
| guidelines got adjusted which led to less invasive care.
| The second link is very 'Welt'-typical, at first using
| almost tabloid language only to then not delivering on
| the promise. The interviewee goes into the topic of
| hospitals having the wrong financial incentives for
| optimizing the duration of intubation but doesn't accuse
| a systemic wrong-doing or patient harming. Fair enough,
| the system is not perfect but it's far from "systematic
| hospitalization where ambulant treatment would be
| possible and recommended". Not sure about Prof. Stohr, I
| read some of his criticism on how the pandemic is handled
| regarding schools, the idea of a mandatory vaccine and
| things like country wide measures vs. more local adjusted
| measures. I didn't hear him saying there is a _systemic_
| problem of wrongly administered intensive care just to
| make money.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Unsafe Doctor waiting rooms and dubious testing kits in
| Germany are some big claims that need some serious sources to
| be taken as truth.
|
| Particularly if said by a person that says "Arab
| Familienclans".
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| oh really?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s157CbfS5xg&list=PLuiYhcgFT
| m...
|
| > Unsafe Doctor waiting rooms
|
| what source? it's trivial to verify. visit a couple of
| doctors in the city of a large German town and count number
| of people sitting in a room with special notice to those
| who are coughing and sneezing ...
|
| > dubious testing kits
|
| I'm not aware of systematic audits of test kits. In Germany
| a device is considered alright if it has a CE printed on it
| and maybe some other numbers. That's a usual source of many
| problems with food, toys etc. nothing new here. Also it's
| currently in the media that not all test kits respond
| equally to Omicron - so, it's not like they are
| standardized. They are now starting device specific audit
| to check for sensitivity.
| tloup wrote:
| >In Germany a device is considered alright if it has a CE
| printed on it and maybe some other numbers.
|
| No. I'm a software engineer for clinical studies and
| medical devices and this is not true for any medical
| device, which includes antigen tests, at all. Also these
| tests had a time limited special permit which ran out a
| few months ago, which is why they were able to be sold.
| here is a FAQ about antigen tests:
| https://www.bfarm.de/DE/Medizinprodukte/_FAQ/Antigen-
| Tests/f...
|
| >Die Neubewertung hat ergeben, dass ein gravierender
| Versorgungsengpass und damit das Interesse des
| Gesundheitsschutzes an einer Sonderzulassung
| entsprechender Tests nach SS 11 Abs. 1 MPG durch das
| BfArM nicht mehr besteht. Diese Bewertung wird ab dem 15.
| Juli 2021 fur die Antragsbewertung aller laufenden und
| neu eingehenden Antrage nach SS 11 Abs. 1 MPG zugrunde
| gelegt.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| https://www.fr.de/panorama/horror-
| mandarinennetz-12204896.ht...
|
| seems like you're up for a surprise.
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| Source? Because that sounds like a whole bunch of conspiracy
| theories packed together.
| tloup wrote:
| It's because it is. The money they get from intubating and
| all care required covers the cost and makes a little
| profit, but there is no reason at all why they would do
| that to a person that doesn't need it. It takes a heavy
| toll on the doctors and nurses too. If a hospital director
| would run rampant and tell docs to willy nilly intubate
| someone it would be all over the news and doctors wouldn't
| agree to it either (they are in very short supply in
| Germany and wouldn't bother putting their reputation on the
| line).
|
| You also have to be aware that around 25% of all Germans
| are in one way or another prone to believe in conspiracy
| theories, e.g. great reset and so on. Sadly I only have a
| German source on this, but this was a major point of
| discussion in the long running "Mitte Studie" which is one
| of the best and most rigorous studies about Germans and
| their political beliefs.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| source for what? you're welcome to use google btw. might
| save us some time.
| maaanu wrote:
| One can make any statement and if the "opposition" wants
| to see some proof you just deflect it and require them to
| bring proof that your statement is incorrect? That sounds
| incredible one-sided.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| i'm asking for what do you want a proof ...
| OJFord wrote:
| > As stupid as it sounds, I could not force my parents to go
| and wait in the line to get COVID test, after he says "I
| believe I don't have COVID now. But if I go to the testing
| center that is so badly managed and understaffed where only
| people with obvious high level of COVID are brought to get
| official result, I will get COVID there!".
|
| May I ask why you wanted them to? Honestly his response sounds
| rational to me.
| javajosh wrote:
| It does sound rational, but incomplete. The missing piece is
| the one where he searches for (and hopefully finds) an
| alternative where he can get tested without increasing risk
| of infection. For example, tracking down an at-home test (he
| could have used one of the 1M+ tests that Florida recently
| allowed to expire).
| reacharavindh wrote:
| My parents visited my sister for 2 days. They traveled by a
| private car, but must have stopped for food along the way.
| After they have been back, both of them experienced fatigue
| and cold symptoms. As much as it is normal for them to
| experience after a trip, I wanted them to rule out COVID
| early. I have heard that early diagnosis and treatment for
| COVID at their age can be a life saving difference.
|
| If I experienced the same symptoms here in NL, I'd have also
| taken a test myself just to be sure that I am not spreading
| it around.
|
| His decision is rational after he explained the reason to me.
| However, I wish that reason doesn't exist and that people can
| get tested without such concerns.
| ftzay wrote:
| Your parents are smart. Hospitals are a prime spreading
| location and testing centers are often crowded. Also, an
| overworked nurse may make mistakes in testing centers and slip
| up on hygiene rules.
|
| The situation is similar in Europe, actually. Including loss of
| trust.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| Everyone talks so much shit on USA car culture but our
| testing centers are typically a drive thru where patients are
| isolated in their cars thereby protecting everyone. Patients
| swab themselves and then hand the sample over through a few
| inch opening in the window.
| jhatax wrote:
| This isn't the typical scenario in the Bay Area where
| testing centers are walk-in vs. drive through. To ensure
| testing consistency, swabbing is done by a healthcare
| worker (e.g., nurse) not by the person being tested. This
| is my experience across 4-counties here, San Francisco city
| included.
|
| Net-net, COVID-testing privacy isn't a laudable consequence
| of the US's car culture, at least not everywhere in the US.
| yumraj wrote:
| I know of at least 1 drive-through testing center, at the
| San Jose Fairgrounds. There may be more, but not sure.
|
| Though there the testers/nurse puts the swab in the nose.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| So many downsides to that.. how do you get tested if you
| dont have a car? How do you drive a car when you are very
| sick? How do you make sure properly do the test on
| themselves?
|
| Sorry, but I dont find this a good argument in favor of a
| car-culture at all.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not a theoretical harm, either.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-07/op-ed-
| drive...
|
| > For each walk-up site, we looked at how many people
| live within a mile radius and could conceivably walk to
| the site. You don't need to look at a map to know that
| too many people and places are left behind. If you don't
| have a car but live in South Los Angeles, chances are you
| can find a nearby walk-up test site. But if you're
| carless in East L.A., there is not a single walk-up
| option in your community. The entire San Fernando Valley
| -- with a population of almost 2 million -- received its
| first and only walk-up site, in Arleta, in late June.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/new-yorkers-without-a-
| car-ar...
|
| > After trekking nearly two hours on public transit to
| get to the testing site in Flatbush, a neighborhood in
| New York's Brooklyn borough, the 30-year-old taproom
| manager was surprised to discover a line of cars snaking
| around the address instead of a line of people. McGrath,
| who does not own a car, approached a state trooper at the
| testing site to confirm his suspicions that a vehicle was
| required to be tested.
|
| > "I walk up to one of the state troopers and he says,
| 'You can't walk in, you have to have a car,'" McGrath
| told Business Insider, adding that it appeared as though
| he was not the first New Yorker to arrive at the testing
| site on foot.
| rob74 wrote:
| And here I was thinking that Germany was car-centric...
| anecdotal evidence, but in my small town there is a
| testing site in a pharmacy a few hundred meters from my
| home, and I couldn't imagine that you would have trouble
| finding a testing site accessible by foot or public
| transport in larger cities.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| I have gotten so many covid tests in the past two years.
| Some of them are drive thru only but most don't care
| either way. In DTLA proper the testing centers are mostly
| for pedestrians.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Consider the possibility that your experiences aren't
| universal.
|
| I cited specific examples of people having trouble
| getting tested without a car.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| jeromegv wrote:
| Services only being available for the middle class car
| owners is hardly something that has been dealt with in
| the US. But you would never recognize it if you drive
| your own car and never had to deal with taking public
| transit to live your daily life.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| I literally walked by a testing center in LA two days ago
| that was for pedestrians but please continue making
| assumptions about what I know.
|
| I spent YEARS taking public transportation in
| Philadelphia and you know what? It sucked massive donkey
| balls.
|
| This is why I bought a house in the suburbs. Public
| transportation is for the poors (and New Yorkers I
| guess). Sorry not sorry.
| dang wrote:
| You've posted an egregious number of comments breaking
| the site guidelines recently, so we've banned this
| account.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that
| you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Still happening to people in September 2021:
| https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/09/21/after-cvs-denies-
| bic...
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| chasd00 wrote:
| has the type of "swabs" changed? i don't see myself doing
| the tickle-your-brain type nasal swab i've had done when
| getting tested (only once when my wife ( a teacher ) was
| exposed ). My hand would just respectively refuse the
| order from my brain.
| gentryb wrote:
| There are various types of PCR tests - I suspect you are
| referring to a Nasopharyngeal swab - which goes from tip
| of the nose to base of the ear (and it much smaller than
| a long Q-Tip) vs a nasal swab that usually gets both
| nostrils and doesn't go in nearly so far.
|
| I've personally done Nasopharyngeal swabbing in a drive-
| thru. I will be supervising self-swabbing at a University
| starting tomorrow. They are very different things. One is
| a Q-Tip that only gets inserted into the nasal cavity.
| The tickle-your-brain swab is a different thing entirely.
| It requires training to do properly (enters approximately
| 90 degrees to your face) and while I learned how it feels
| from both sides, I can't imagine someone being asked to
| self-administer a Nasopharyngeal swab.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| Having a car is not a requirement to get tested. It has
| made it really easy to get tested though. For what it's
| worth, this isn't our idea as a nation. Korea was doing
| it before us.
|
| The drive through testing really does offload a lot of
| stress that would otherwise be placed on physicians and
| pharmacies. The logistics are a huge win. Locally we've
| had unoccupied parking structures used to house the
| tests. Even without that you basically just need a
| parking lot, a couple tents, and a restroom.
|
| If you're so sick you can't drive you can have DoorDash
| or any other delivery service send you an at home test.
| If you're too sick for that, you probably should call for
| medical services and not an antigen test.
|
| I'm in Georgia, which has not offered any support for
| people during the pandemic beyond what the Federal
| government provided, and it's pretty easy to get a test
| due to the efforts of private companies. If you don't
| have a car you can often walk up provided there is a
| sidewalk. We also have testing available in every chain
| pharmacy and in dedicated facilities that have sprung up
| in unoccupied mall space or buildings used by bank
| branches and fast food establishments that are vacant.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| Tostino wrote:
| I rode my scooter through the CVS drive through for a
| test this weekend to get tested. It's really not an
| issue.
| refurb wrote:
| You walk. That's what they did in SF. One lane for cars,
| one for pedestrians.
| [deleted]
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| "drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps
| a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to
| say if its bad or not,"
| refurb wrote:
| You're equating cars with drunk driving?
| [deleted]
| hiyer wrote:
| In India - at least in the cities - you don't even need to
| step out for a Covid test. You can request a technician to
| come and collect your sample from the comfort of your home,
| and you'll get the result in a few hours or the next day at
| most. I'm not sure where the commenter's parents live, but
| if they live even in a moderate-sized city, they're being
| unnecessarily paranoid.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Thanks for bringing this up. I will check whether such a
| facility exists in the village where my parents live. If
| you're curious, they live in Srirangam, Trichy,
| TamilNadu.
| hiyer wrote:
| > If you're curious, they live in Srirangam, Trichy,
| TamilNadu
|
| Wonderful place, except for the heat :-). I've visited
| there (for the temples) on a few occasions.
| cocoland2 wrote:
| A lot of testing centers / labs such as Lister or
| Thyrocare can do in person sample collections, such as
| this one below are available.
|
| Its quite easy to get a test done at home. (Mentioned of
| lister metropolis because they had come home for some
| other sample collection and mentioned of this) . You can
| check aggregator apps as well that provide this list.
|
| https://www.metropolisindia.com/parameter/trichy/covid-19
| -rt...
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Here in Thailand I can walk into 7-11 and buy a rapid
| antigen test for $3 and go take it at home
| FabHK wrote:
| Same in Germany.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| The testing centers are free for the most part.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Driving to a testing center and sitting in your car could
| easily use $3 in gas and more of your time. 7-11 is
| absolutely everywhere here, you don't understand the
| level of convenience.
|
| I'm in my condo right now, I could go to a 7-11, come
| back and have my result all within 10 minutes for $3. But
| yeah car culture in America is great
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| cinntaile wrote:
| 4 min drive? That sounds like perfect walking distance.
| It's better too, when you suspect you might have covid.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| cinntaile wrote:
| That's not bad, only 22 min difference between walking
| and driving.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| There is a 7-11 within short walking distance of
| virtually everybody here in Bangkok. And free delivery
| too from 7-11 if you order more than 100 baht (around $3)
|
| > If there even is public transportation to speak of
|
| The public transportation here in Bangkok is amazing.
| It's clean, on time, and affordable
| dathinab wrote:
| Are home/self tests an option?
|
| I mean if it's just about knowing it yourself so that you can
| get yourself PCR tested when you known you likely have it (and
| as such might soon need medical support).
|
| That seems like a valid option for me, though only if available
| and hospitalized reasonable priced.
|
| For be the difference between self-tests rapid tests and test
| station rapid tests seem to mainly be:
|
| - if you have self-test
|
| - if you can afford it (test station rapid tests are up to some
| limit payed by health care, in my case)
|
| - if you need the digital certificate that you did a tests
| (some places require vaccination + test)
|
| - self-test produce more wast through additional packaging,
| non-reusable plastic tubes etc.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > hospitals faking COVID test results just so that they can
| admit them for 4 days, administer expensive drugs, charge them
| some hefty bill, and send home
|
| Why would hospitals admit someone who isn't actually in need of
| care? If you need hospital care for Covid, it's (almost
| exclusively) because you need supplemental oxygen, and that's
| something that's pretty hard to fake.
|
| Edit: the question is: how are these hospitalizations actually
| done practically. Are doctors faking diagnoses (e.g. hypoxia),
| convincing patients they need care, which they are persuaded to
| accept? Or are patients forcibly admitted without being asked?
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Blunt answer : Money, greed, short term thinking and lack of
| ethics.
|
| How? Doctors turn into actors and cheat the public.
| Anecdotally, my relatives say they were never treated for
| COVID, but told that they needed admission because they have
| high risks(diabetes, respiratory troubles, high blood
| pressure) and need to be monitored in order to make sure
| COVID is treated early. After 4 days of a battery of
| tests(non COVID related), they are sent home saying they
| escaped the wrath of COVID because they were lucky. I don't
| know what to say.
| alkonaut wrote:
| This is why I'd never want to visit any doctor whose
| paycheck is affected by the treatment he gives (or
| doesn't).
|
| A doctor who has even a small kickback on prescriptions
| from a pharmaceutical company is completely out of the
| question in my book at least.
| junon wrote:
| > Why would hospitals admit someone who isn't actually in
| need of care?
|
| In places without socialized medical coverage and low levels
| of ethical integrity (unfortunately, too many places in the
| world - especially impoverished states), the answer is
| "money".
| refurb wrote:
| Why would socialized medicine exclude this behavior?
| Medicare fraud in the US is in the billions.
| krageon wrote:
| The US does not have socialised medicine.
| merpnderp wrote:
| A large subset of the US does have socialized medicine.
| Medicare (65 million people), Medicaid (75 million
| people), and the military health system (10 million
| people).
|
| That's nearly half the US population.
| burmanm wrote:
| That insurance isn't socialized medicine. In Europe for
| example, the hospital is owned by the
| government/state/etc, the doctors are hired directly by
| the hospital, the medicine costs are directly set by the
| state and so on.
|
| No private parties at all.
| triceratops wrote:
| > In Europe for example, the hospital is owned by the
| government/state/etc,
|
| Europe is a big place with many different types of
| systems. What you're describing sounds like the UK. But
| places like NL[1] or DE[2] are more like Medicare/aid for
| all (basic coverage) + Obamacare (mandatory private
| insurance, sometimes supplementary). The providers may be
| private practitioners.
|
| NB: I'm not an expert in these systems so I may have
| gotten some details wrong. My main point is that
| "European healthcare" isn't a monolith and it's not all
| state-owned.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlan
| ds
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| I believe parent referred to Medicare as a subset in
| American health care that is socialized, to some degree.
| krageon wrote:
| I guess I am mostly alone in thinking that for a system
| to be socialised, it has to apply to everyone or almost
| everyone in a country equally. From the comments and the
| voting, I understand that having it apply to "almost"
| half the population is already socialised to this time
| slot :)
| refurb wrote:
| So by your definition much of Europe (which has a robust
| private healthcare system) isn't socialized?
| krageon wrote:
| Europe isn't a country and doesn't have uniform policies
| in this way. It also doesn't have things as an entity
| (except for a selection of laws that it's members
| implement differently in most cases).
|
| Because of those facts, I have trouble even formulating a
| response to your question - it doesn't make sense to me.
| notch656a wrote:
| We do, just for certain groups, such as elderly and the
| poor. Hell like 40% of births here are paid for by
| medicaid. But we have system here where only up to upper
| middle class (~$142k) of income is paid to social
| security tax, so middle class pays for both poor and
| themselves, while poor pays for no one and rich
| disproportionately only pay for themselves.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| There is no income limit on Medicare payroll taxes, just
| social security.
| notch656a wrote:
| Agreed, although that doesn't negate the presence of
| socialized health care.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Yes, but at least there is more equity between poor and
| rich in this regard.
| notch656a wrote:
| More like equity between middle class and rich. The poor
| are getting free stuff at expense of both.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The rich have more because they have more money, giving
| poor people free stuff actually increases equity, it
| doesn't decrease it. SS isn't very equitable because of
| the income limits, payroll taxes in general are less
| equitable because they aren't (very) progressive.
| notch656a wrote:
| One person being handed health care on a silver platter
| while I work the better part of a week to pay for it for
| my family doesn't sound equitable to me.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You are assuming the poor in America aren't working hard
| and are having health care handed to them on a silver
| platter, neither of which is true in general. But sure,
| many poor people (who don't qualify for Medicaid) are
| looking forward to the day they turn 65 and can get
| healthcare benefits...hoping that they live that long
| enough to see any of that.
|
| Of all the developed countries, only America treats its
| non-rich citizens so harshly. Your implied advice that
| poor people should "just work harder and make more
| money!" isn't very useful.
| notch656a wrote:
| Resorting to a bunch of straw-man attacks making lying
| and vicious, calculated claims to make me look like I've
| attacked the poor as "not working hard" is a really bad
| look for you. It's the look of someone who failed at
| making a cogent argument so they resort to a sob story
| about me attacking the poor.
|
| All I'm saying is it isn't equitable for one person (who
| could have not worked a day in their life) to be handed
| health care on a silver platter while I work the better
| part of a week to pay for it for my family. Do you not
| understand many on public health care don't have to work
| for the better part of a week to receive benefits, and
| never have? I'm not talking about old people who spent 40
| years paying into the system.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You said:
|
| > One person being handed health care on a silver platter
| while I work the better part of a week to pay for it for
| my family doesn't sound equitable to me. reply
|
| This exactly implies that if only those poor people
| worked a "better part of a week to pay for it" like you
| did, they wouldn't be getting their health care served on
| a silver platter. Not a straw man.
| notch656a wrote:
| The straw man is that I've assumed ' the poor in America
| aren't working hard' and that I implied 'that poor people
| should just work harder and make more money!'
|
| Of course if you compensate providers for health care
| through the fruit of your labor and investments, you've
| earned it and it hasn't been provided to you on a silver
| platter; I don't think anyone is disputing that.
|
| >This exactly implies that if only those poor people
| worked a "better part of a week to pay for it" like you
| did, they wouldn't be getting their health care served on
| a silver platter.
|
| See my response below:
|
| By handed on a silver platter I was referring to someone
| capable of working, but who requests (and is handed)
| health care for free without performing any labor at all
| at the expense of someone working and paying an
| involuntary tax. I never said that was all or even most
| poor. I'm not referring to the poor person making 7.50
| buying their own private health insurance. There's
| probably an argument from some perspective that
| 'equitable' could mean everyone works the same amount of
| labor (20 hours or whatever) per month to pay for
| healthcare, although I'm not sure even that would
| precisely be equitable. One able bodied person of equal
| insurance risk pool to another working BOTH more hours
| AND paying more for same insurance would certainly sound
| inequitable.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The person you replied to was being generous to your
| argument, and nothing but polite. The fact is that plenty
| of the "poor" work as much as you do, but you think
| they're somehow enslaving you because you get paid more.
|
| If you continued working the same job you have now, but
| at $7.50/hr, would it be fair to characterize your
| receiving the same health care you receive now as being
| handed to you on a silver platter?
| notch656a wrote:
| >The person you replied to was being generous to your
| argument, and nothing but polite.
|
| And nothing says generous and polite by making the lying,
| vicious claim that I've assumed ' the poor in America
| aren't working hard' and that I implied 'that poor people
| should just work harder and make more money!' It's purely
| fiction designed to paint me as the evil denigrator of
| the poor.
|
| >The fact is that plenty of the "poor" work as much as
| you do, but you think they're somehow enslaving you
| because you get paid more.
|
| 'The fact' that both of you have to put words in my mouth
| (or alleged thoughts) to make your argument speaks
| volumes here.
|
| >If you continued working the same job you have now, but
| at $7.50/hr, would it be fair to characterize your
| receiving the same health care you receive now as being
| handed to you on a silver platter?
|
| By handed on a silver platter I was referring to someone
| capable of working, but who requests (and is handed)
| health care for free without performing any labor at all
| at the expense of someone working and paying an
| involuntary tax. I never said that was all or even most
| poor. I'm not referring to the poor person making 7.50
| buying their own private health insurance. There's
| probably an argument from some perspective that
| 'equitable' could mean everyone works the same amount of
| labor (20 hours or whatever) per month to pay for
| healthcare, although I'm not sure even that would
| precisely be equitable. One able bodied person of equal
| insurance risk pool to another working BOTH more hours
| AND paying more for same insurance would certainly sound
| inequitable.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| The key word is fraud: getting something for nothing.
| Medicare itself bills at a lower rate than private
| insurance. For many doctors and hospitals, Medicare can
| be a margin-reducing annoyance. The private insurance
| patients are where the moneys at.
| refurb wrote:
| Fraud being changed for unneeded services?
|
| Not sure what your point is.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| That kind of fraud can occur because you have a
| socialized system interfacing with a non-socialized one.
| The government is paying the costs, but they don't
| actually have much control over or oversight of the care.
| It is not like Australia where the government is all in
| by funding the hospitals and doctors directly.
| refurb wrote:
| https://www.counterfraud.gov.au/case-studies/clinic-
| owner-co...
|
| _"A medical clinic owner defrauded the Commonwealth of
| more than $3.3 million by claiming rebates for services
| not given to over 5,870 different patients."_
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| He got caught very quickly, I'm not sure what this proves
| (that idiots exist in every country?).
| refurb wrote:
| You claimed it doesn't happen in Australia and I proved
| it does.
|
| Why are you moving goal posts?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This is like a Trump supporter claiming that the
| Democrats stole the election because a bunch of Trump
| voters got caught voting illegally, very easily
| because...the system actually works. Here, yes, you can
| still commit fraud in Australia, but your chances of
| getting caught quickly are almost 100%.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Yes perhaps the question was unclearly posed, I mean - how
| do people allow themselves to be admitted to expensive care
| without being in need of it?
|
| Are doctors "persuading" patients that they need care, and
| the problem is lack of information about what rights you
| have to actually refuse, or information about what the
| symptoms would be etc?
| junon wrote:
| Yep that's usually what happens. Not everyone has the
| same access to basic medical information and rely solely
| on the doctor's word. That is how many people fall into
| cult-like or religious "medicine" or end up spending way
| too much on otherwise farsical treatment.
| Alterlife wrote:
| As an Indian living in India, I've heard some of these
| stories:
|
| a. They are asked to get admitted "for observation because
| they are at high risk". If they ask to leave, the doctors ask
| them to sign a very scary sounding wavier disclaiming the
| hospital of responsibility for their death.
|
| b. There apparently this one lab that will return a positive
| covid test if the docs ask them to and they get a cut of what
| the patient pays.
|
| It needs to be said that I don't know if any of these are
| true.
| slowhand09 wrote:
| The [US]CDC director just said over 75% of "covid deaths"
| occurred in people with at least four comorbidities. Since the
| US administration can't shut down covid, suddenly all this data
| is getting shared publicly.
| wumpus wrote:
| The whole point of studying excess deaths is to figure out
| covid's contribution over and above the usual number of
| deaths due to these pretty common conditions (like high blood
| pressure.)
| instagraham wrote:
| As an Indian, I can tell you that every single family I know
| has lost someone to COVID. But this part of India wasn't as
| torn apart as the cities like Delhi or Bangalore. Or like rural
| India, whose death toll we never counted.
|
| Both sides of the ideological split here were arguing over the
| stats until the Ganges swelled up with bodies. But even then,
| the right continues to deny the extent of death.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Say what you will, but if the basic trust in doctors and
| healthcare is lost, how would people get tested, and how can
| you trust any statistics from there?!
|
| To me this is a huge problem: some doctors are gaming the
| system and providing fake covid certificates or vaccination
| stamps. What else could doctors be hiding from me in other
| situations ? My mom said it was a war crime to deliver fake
| covid vaccination stamps (I can see how a doctor doing that
| would see himself as a resistant so good luck having a healthy
| debate about that). It breaks something fundamental. In a way I
| hope most of them did it for the money rather than out of anti-
| vax/anti-system.
|
| On a related note I was stuck for three days in a house during
| this summer's flood (floor level flooded, second okay, I stayed
| at the third) . I had food, water and was okay. At some point I
| could have left the house to be relocated in a roofed sport
| centre or a school with other people but I decided against it
| in fear of getting covid in a crowded space. It was before
| omicron. Maybe I overreacted but I didn't want to take any
| risks.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| All this hate for the medical profession. You have people who
| work long hours, bear huge responsibility and are treated
| like shit for a pathetic salary.
|
| I honestly don't even know why they keep doing it. You get
| less crazies as a prison guard and they have better security.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Lack of trust because of misdeeds does not mean one hates
| all Doctor and nurses who work their ass off to literally
| save people's lives. It is not binary.
|
| There is a difference between - will I go to the hospital
| if I get hurt or have a medical need versus do I trust the
| hospital to not fleece for some care I may not need. The
| fact that this question needs to be asked is a result of
| the lack of trust. If there is any profession where there
| should have been zero tolerance for malpractice, it is this
| noble medical profession.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| What hate ? Most people who hate on the medical profession
| are antivax. There has been violent actions taken against
| the medical workers in vaccination and testing centers in
| Belgium and France.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| In the US it is the accumulation of years of frustration
| with our for-profit system. Insurance at a minimum feels
| like a parasite, and then on top of that it is the
| personification of byzantine bureaucratic mazes and
| arbitrary rulings.
|
| Insurance is also fragile, where an employee that needs
| their healthcare for something like cancer is then exposed
| to be laid off and lose coverage.
|
| When you need it most, you are subjected to exploitation
| and fraud: surprise billing, lack of coverage, and doctors
| that feign ignorance about costs and complexities.
|
| Meanwhile anyone that knows how billing professionals
| knows: #1 rule is bill when you can, the #2 rule is to bill
| as much as possible.
|
| The end result is a lack of faith in our system, where it
| is just a system of profiteering and exploitation.
|
| They work long hours because they will eventually make a
| lot of money (my friend is a cardiologist, not even a
| surgeon, and makes 800k per year in the US) and get huge
| amounts of prestige. Doctors are the only nerd profession
| that is cool and sexy. And the number of hours is actually
| less than it used to be back in the day.
|
| Of course, you don't get as many perks from the drug/device
| company reps anymore, or have they figured out how to give
| doctors steak dinners and golf junkets again?
| dudul wrote:
| A war crime? For which ongoing war?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| The one on Covid. See Macron last year's speech
| https://www.bbc.com/news/av/51917380
|
| Of course my mom is not asking for a war tribunal to
| prosecute people. She's talking about the gravity of the
| facts.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| I believe they meant to express the idea that such a
| scenario is beyond morally reprehensible, so as to liken it
| morally to a war crime.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| In her head it's more like "these people are fighting the
| state and are enemy of the state and its citizens".
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| [deleted]
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > If vaccination does not meaningfully prevent
| transmission, as increasingly seems to be case with
| Omicron, faking vaccination harms only the fake recipient.
|
| keyword being _if_ and _meaningfully_.
|
| Anyway that fake recipient may still need top notch
| expensive care to stay alive if he doesn't get mild covid.
| Are you suggesting that he should pay in full for those
| care since you state it only harms the fake recipient ?
|
| Also, it increasingly seems that a third dose significantly
| increases protection against omicron.
| toolz wrote:
| The unvaccinated haven't done nearly the damage policy
| has to hospitals. The US has like 6-7% fewer staffed beds
| than before the pandemic and has stupidly decided to fire
| unvaccinated healthcare workers that have almost
| assuredly developed their immunity naturally.
|
| People seem to forget much of the world still has no
| access to vaccines. Every person being vaccinated with
| natural immunity is someone without immunity missing that
| vaccine.
| refurb wrote:
| Yup. California is now changing the rules to allow Covid
| positive healthcare works to come back without any
| quarantine.
|
| https://www.kcra.com/article/nurses-react-
| covid-19-protocols...
|
| So is France and Canada.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What does natural immunity mean with new variants and
| when it lasts from 90 days to six months? Are these
| people going to pay to get their antibody titers checked
| every week? If they incubate a new variant themselves are
| they willing to be held personally liable?
| toolz wrote:
| >What does natural immunity mean with new variants and
| when it lasts from 90 days to six months?
|
| I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you saying that
| antibodies last 90 days to 6 months? Firstly that's
| incorrect as antibodies seem to be detectable even after
| 8 months in the study I'm remembering, but more
| importantly your immune system is made up of many parts
| and antibodies are not the primary response to
| coronaviruses since the antibodies do fade rather
| quickly.
|
| Instead the many other parts of our immune system are
| extremely long lived with other coronaviruses and there's
| no reason to expect they won't be extremely long lived
| with covid.
|
| In fact the reason you see so many asymptomatic cases
| with covid is because of preexisting natural immunity to
| similar coronaviruses.
|
| > If they incubate a new variant themselves are they
| willing to be held personally liable?
|
| Are you suggesting if we had the tech (we don't) to trace
| down the exact host where a virus mutates into a
| recognizably different strain that host should be liable?
| I think you should really reflect on exactly that would
| mean and exactly how harmful that would be for society.
| You do realize every single person in the entire world
| will either die in the next couple of years or without a
| doubt be attacked by covid, right? That means you'd
| basically be putting up a lottery system to see who gets
| to lose for being "ground zero" for a new variant
| mutation. This would be completely pointless and would
| serve only to hurt people with zero chance of helping
| anyone.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| Yes, I think that would be an excellent idea, and quite a
| few countries are in fact moving in that direction.
|
| Early evidence is that the protection against
| transmission from the booster appears to be quite
| fleeting (weeks, not months), so the main reason to
| vaccinate is really to protect yourself.
| acdha wrote:
| Vaccination continues to reduce transmission (less for
| Omicron than before, but it was known never to be be 100%)
| but it also significantly reduces the number of people with
| serious cases (still quite successful even with Omicron).
|
| That means there's a big side effect from people not
| getting vaccinated: the healthcare system has finite
| capacity and when it's full of people who wouldn't be there
| if they'd been vaccinated, that means space isn't available
| for anyone who has some other problem and the healthcare
| system is losing a lot of expensively trained people due to
| stress. It is extra hard on them to watch people die for
| avoidable reasons and many nurses, doctors, etc. have left
| at least temporarily due to burnout.
| robbiep wrote:
| Not sure where the early downvotes are coming from but
| this is correct: my state has 95% 2 dose vaccination of
| adults and currently 150 ventilated patients- half of
| those are unvaccinated.
|
| So 5% of the population represents 50% of ICU ventilator
| capacity.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| toolz wrote:
| While I'm sure the unvaccinated represent more, it's also
| true that many reporting stats considered double
| vaccinated to be in the unvaccinated category if they are
| eligible for a booster and haven't had them.
| refurb wrote:
| Yup. I've seen similar gaming. Of the people who died in
| Singapore, 5/8th weren't "fully vaccinated", so they lump
| in the ones with one dose and those who haven't met some
| predefined period of time post-2nd dose.
| acdha wrote:
| I don't know which sites you're seeing but the ones I use
| tend to break that out as "partially vaccinated" or
| "fully vaccinated" vs "fully vaccinated with booster" --
| which is good since the evidence has shown that there's a
| big difference between the waning protection against
| infection (i.e. neutralizing antibodies) versus
| protection against severe cases (i.e. T cells) even for
| partial vaccination.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://www
| .washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/covid-va...
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-
| vaccina...
|
| https://covidactnow.org/ uses "at least one dose" for the
| national map but breaks out their state-level displays as
| "1+" and "fully vaccinated".
| robbiep wrote:
| This is not the case where I live, work and practice
| medicine
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| How much does it reduce transmission? Do you have links
| or know the studies to look for? (It's difficult for me
| to wade through everything out there and know what the
| "good" studies and data are)
| acdha wrote:
| It's still early but here's an example of what it's
| looking like:
|
| https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.212682
| 78v...
|
| > Our results show that the Omicron VOC is generally
| 2.7-3.7 times more infectious than the Delta VOC among
| vaccinated individuals (Table 3). This observation is in
| line with data from (18), which estimated that 19% of
| Omicron VOC primary cases in households in the UK
| resulted in at least one other infection within the
| household, compared to only 8.3% of those associated with
| the Delta VOC. Furthermore, we show that fully vaccinated
| and booster-vaccinated individuals are generally less
| susceptible to infection compared to unvaccinated
| individuals (Table 2). We also show that booster-
| vaccinated individuals generally had a reduced
| transmissibility (OR: 0.72, CI: 0.56-0.92), and that
| unvaccinated individuals had a higher transmissibility
| (OR: 1.41, CI: 1.27-1.57), compared to fully vaccinated
| individuals.
|
| > Surprisingly, we observed no significant difference
| between the SAR of Omicron versus Delta among
| unvaccinated individuals (Table 3). This indicates that
| the increased trans-missibility of the Omicron VOC
| primarily can be ascribed to immune evasion rather than
| an inherent increase in the basic transmissibility.
|
| That last part is why the boosters matter: neutralizing
| antibodies (which your body stops producing over time
| after the infection) can prevent someone from getting
| sick at all, whereas the longer-lasting T cell response
| helps your immune system fight it off more effectively.
| If the entire population is boosted, that would have been
| plenty to fight off Delta but with Omicron we still need
| a combination of other measures (masks, air
| filtering/exchange, etc.) and eventually updated boosters
| to put an end ot it. That doesn't mean that being
| vaccinated isn't worthwhile, of course: you're still far
| more likely to have a better outcome if you get it and
| the window where you're contagious is smaller.
| nradov wrote:
| I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by
| getting vaccinated but we're really chasing our tails by
| focusing on antibody levels. In the long run cellular
| immunity is more important. We can't give everyone
| boosters every few months just to keep antibody levels
| up.
|
| https://youtu.be/GklHGYY8vN8
|
| We can't put an end to this virus. It will be around at
| some level forever.
| acdha wrote:
| That's why the different between the neutralizing
| antibodies and T cells is so important: when the pandemic
| is raging, your odds of exposure are high and so public
| health people are concerned about the ability of
| vaccinated individuals to slow the spread impacting the
| entire healthcare system. The medical system is under
| levels of stress which haven't been seen in a century so
| they're understandably focused on trying all of the tools
| available to calm things down.
|
| Once it's spreading at a lower level, your risk of
| personal exposure is much lower and the long-lasting T
| cell response becomes more of a focus because that
| reduces risk to the person and you're less worried about
| the crunch of many thousands of people showing up at the
| hospital at the same time because for someone vaccinated
| it's more like something like influenza where most people
| have a bad week or two but don't urgently need medical
| treatment.
| 542458 wrote:
| 1) I'm not aware of any research that shows near-zero
| reduction in transmission rate. As far as I'm aware,
| research shows that vaccination rate reductions in
| transmissiveness that are less than previous strains, but
| dramatically better than nothing.
|
| https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278
| v...
|
| > For households with the Omicron VOC, the corresponding OR
| for infection for unvaccinated individuals was 1.04 (CI:
| 0.87-1.24) and 0.54 (CI: 0.40-0.71) for booster-vaccinated
| individuals.
|
| 2) Keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed and keeping
| people from dying is a legitimate goal of vaccination, even
| in the absence of any reduction in transmission. The
| vaccine remains effective at this. Hospitalization rates
| for the unvaccinated are leagues higher than the
| vaccinated.
| yorwba wrote:
| > As far as I'm aware, research shows that a two-dose
| vaccination rate provides disappointing reductions in
| transmissiveness - but far, far better than nothing.
|
| The paper you quote shows two-dose vaccination (or
| previous infection) _increasing_ the secondary attack
| rate from 29% (unvaccinated) to 32%, i.e. worse than
| nothing. Only a booster reduces it back to 25%.
|
| My guess is that the increase is not due to direct
| biochemical effects of vaccination/prior infection, but
| due to people assuming that they're protected and taking
| fewer precautions. Demographic differences might also
| play a role.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Nope, nope nope, not at all.
|
| > _After adjustment for confounders, we found that in
| households with the Delta VOC, the OR of infection was
| 2.31 (95% confidence interval (CI) 2.09-2.55) for
| unvaccinated individuals and 0.38 (CI: 0.32-0.46) for
| booster-vaccinated individuals when compared to fully
| vaccinated potential secondary cases. For households with
| the Omicron VOC, the corresponding OR for infection for
| unvaccinated individuals was 1.04 (CI: 0.87-1.24) and
| 0.54 (CI: 0.40-0.71) for booster-vaccinated individuals._
|
| For delta, two dose vaccination helps. For Omicron, there
| is no statistically significant effect of two dose
| vaccination.
|
| In no case is there an increase from two dose vaccination
| of attack rates.
| nsonha wrote:
| this question will appear insulting but do you think there is a
| cultural reason why there is so much scamming in India or by
| Indians? I've read many hackernews posts on Indian swe
| candidate lying on the take home test or CV. 100% of the phone
| scammers I encountered here in Australia have a South Asian
| accent.
|
| I am from a developing country myself and do understand that
| this kind of thing happens when a big part of a country is low
| on the Maslow's hierarchy, but India seems to get it worse
| somehow?
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| India is by far the largest poor country by population, it's
| reasonably advanced technically, and English is widely
| spoken.
|
| It's no coincidence that the other country we often associate
| with scams, Nigeria, is also large and has many English
| speakers.
|
| There are plenty of scams in (say) China as well, they just
| target Chinese speakers.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I get a ton of Chinese language scam robocalls in the US,
| they're just not specifically memorable because I don't
| speak Chinese.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > this question will appear insulting but do you think there
| is a cultural reason why there is so much scamming in India
| or by Indians? I've read many hackernews posts on Indian swe
| candidate lying on the take home test or CV. 100% of the
| phone scammers I encountered here in Australia have a South
| Asian accent.
|
| It's not "cultural", e.g. here in Germany we have a _huge_
| problem with phone fraud originating in Turkey [1]. The
| reason why scams are so common for "foreign" countries is
| relatively simple: fraudsters need people speaking the
| language pretty well, but do not want attention from domestic
| law enforcement... meaning you need a remote country with a
| shoddy/easily bribable law enforcement, speaking the same
| language as the "target" country, a _huge_ supply of
| desperate, poor people willing to turn to crime for money and
| easy ways to transfer money from the target country to the
| source country and back to wherever the ringleaders are. For
| English-speaking countries, the biggest country where these
| conditions meet is India and the Philippines (and
| historically, Nigeria), for German-speaking countries it 's
| Turkey (with historically close migration links from the
| post-WW2 "Gastarbeiter" era).
|
| [1]: https://www.bka.de/DE/UnsereAufgaben/Deliktsbereiche/Bet
| rueg...
| tempuser12121 wrote:
| I know few companies in India who for some amount would write
| essay, thesis for students. A large number of them are from
| US. These companies make very good money from them. Yeah
| everybody cheats, maybe westerns are very good at hiding it.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Another anecdote from the US (New York).
|
| A friend of mine works as a cop. One day someone got shot and
| he had to help get the victim to a hospital. The victim was
| bleeding blood and eventually died in that hospital. A few
| hours later, the hospital provided the cause of death as COVID,
| because they found out that the victim had the virus
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| [deleted]
| nelblu wrote:
| Another anecdote: In my home town, a doctor took the government
| funding to open a covid centre. She then only admitted patients
| that were mild cases and had chances of survival, for those who
| had little chance of surviving she would not admit them and
| send them home. One might think that maybe she was being smart
| in triaging the patients, but I know her personally and her
| only motive was money.... Because relatives are less likely to
| pay for a dead patient than they are for someone who came home
| alive.
|
| Extremely shameful but not surprising.
| laxmin wrote:
| Can you please share the name of that Centre? I would love to
| investigate.
|
| Thanks.
| complexmango wrote:
| I'm from India, and have plenty of family and friends there in
| close contact, and I have literally never heard of anything as
| ridiculous as this yet. No idea why this is a top voted
| comment.
| aluksi wrote:
| So much for the self-righteous angst. As an Indian 'expat',
| what did you do to help? What is it about it that is so
| surprising. It's obvious that being a low income country, the
| health care is not the best, but compared to the rest of the
| world they are doing alright.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| I hope you feel better that you called out on the
| righteousness of someone who highlights a problem. How dare
| someone speak of a problem when you can happily live in an
| ignorant world where everybody always speaks of how good
| things are.
|
| In the interest of a civil discourse. I will say that I did
| mean that I am not surprised by the fact that the stats are
| not correct because I am aware of the ground reality from my
| anecdotal sources that point in the same direction. Not that
| my country does or doesn't do anything.
|
| The first step to solving a problem is recognising that it
| exists, and not wish washing it away.
|
| As an Indian, I'm sad that you're not angry.
| srean wrote:
| > being a low income country, the health care is not the best
|
| The Indian state of Kerala would like to differ.
|
| States and leadership that are more keen on disrupting the
| social fabric, polarize it to gain votes, sure that would
| divert resources into such harmful instruments. The
| consequences were well observed as dead bodies by the
| thousands buried on river sand bars or floating down the
| water, with government officials working to conceal the
| evidence by removing religious commemorative markings left on
| the sand graves.
| nonamechicken wrote:
| > The Indian state of Kerala would like to differ.
|
| Kerala chief minister who is a communist is coming to US
| for health care next week.
|
| https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/kerala-chief-
| minister-...
| formula_ninguna wrote:
| And? What should an average person do with this knowledge -- "may
| have killed"? Get petrified once again and, of course, rush to
| get jabbed, or get a new booster?
|
| And then, of course, keep waiting for other scary news, and yet
| new solutions dictated by the governments and corrupted doctors,
| which will always involve jabs and boosters, and QR codes.
|
| What's the point in this kind of knowledge? Does it impove or
| harm your life?
|
| Compare the mortality rates of bubonic plague and covid, and see
| whether the latter is really dangerous for an average person.
| rhines wrote:
| Same thing you do with knowledge of more people having died in
| anything, say "damn, that sucks" and continue living your life,
| unless you're in a position to do more than that.
|
| As for the mortality rates of bubonic plague and covid, it is
| quite a bit more sensible to be concerned about covid right now
| and want to avoid catching it.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| We (US) are at 850k. No way India is doing better than us per
| capita.
|
| The Omicron new cases reported surge on worldometers is up to
| 800,000 new cases PER DAY, this is more than 300% higher than at
| any point in COVID ever.
|
| The death curves trail the new cases by a bit, so we'll see. But
| holy cow is something up. I really really hope Omicron has
| substantially less mortality.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| After the Spanish Flu and now COVID-19, I think it's time we
| admit that deaths in a pandemic are fully susceptible to
| Goodhart's Law. It may be best if each country's number of deaths
| is kept under wraps until everything is over.
| rajeshp1986 wrote:
| In rural places in India most deaths are not registered at all.
| There are no funeral and memorial services. Family members and
| neighbors get together and perform the last rituals without
| notifying the authorities in any way. The death is counted only
| when family approaches govt for death certificate which is needed
| for bank accounts, transferring real-estate or any other govt
| formalities that needs to be closed. It is hard to get the exact
| count of deaths with such an unorganized system. I don't deny
| govt conspiracy to lower the numbers but I think majority of
| deaths didn't even reach govt books.
| christmm wrote:
| 99_00 wrote:
| High-risk Covid gene more common in South Asians
|
| They say around 60% of people from South Asian backgrounds and
| 15% of people of European ancestry carry the high-risk version of
| the gene.
|
| They estimate the risky version of the gene is present in about
| 2% of people from African-Caribbean backgrounds and 1.8% of
| people of East Asian descent.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59165157
|
| I'm surprised how little press this study got. What is the
| explanation for the lack of coverage I'm missing?
| rei_ayanami wrote:
| Or... its being over reported in the west. US counts people who
| died with covid in the total number, maybe India is a bit more
| sensible in that regard.
| ycIsGarbage wrote:
| hogrider wrote:
| It is well documented they straight up covered up covid deaths
| in republican states.
| vixen99 wrote:
| If you make comments like this, why not provide some link as
| a 'reason to believe'. For all I know you're absolutely spot
| on but I won't get far quoting "hogrider on HN" as a source,
| will I? And if your observation thus goes no further, what's
| the point of it?
| kmos17 wrote:
| This is so easily disproved, just look at total deaths for the
| period. Where do you think they are coming from?
| everforward wrote:
| DUIs are up, suicides are up, overdoses are up, and we keep
| putting off both routine and urgent medical procedures. There
| are people with cancer whose procedures are getting bumped
| because hospitals are full.
|
| There's a meaningful difference between "died from COVID",
| "died with COVID", and "died due to circumstances surrounding
| COVID". Our excess deaths are the sum of those 3 categories.
|
| I can tell you for a fact that "died from COVID" is not 100%
| of those excess deaths, because suicides and overdoses are
| up. I can't tell you what percentage are in each category,
| but this "all excess deaths are from COVID" idea is obviously
| untrue.
|
| The CDC data doesn't even agree with equating excess deaths
| to COVID deaths. [1] Note that they call out accidents and
| diabetes deaths increasing 15%.
|
| 1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/podcasts/2022/20220107/
| 20...
| gilbetron wrote:
| Nearly everything you said is incorrect:
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234
|
| In 2020, suicides down, cancer deaths down (because covid
| tends to kill cancer pages much earlier than they would've
| died, if at all). Some deaths are up, but no where near the
| numbers to outweigh covid deaths.
| everforward wrote:
| You're right on the suicides, I misremembered, my
| apologies.
|
| I don't know why you're going after a straw-man here.
| Your own link even shows that COVID isn't anywhere near
| 100% of the excess deaths, it's ~70% of them. That's my
| only point. Excess death is not a suitable proxy for
| COVID deaths, because COVID deaths are only a portion of
| the excess deaths, sizeable though it may be.
|
| We have excess death, a big portion of those is from
| COVID, but there are numerous elevated causes of death
| that also form a substantial portion of those excess
| deaths. You can't just declare that we have 500k excess
| deaths, and COVID is around, so COVID killed 500k people.
| [deleted]
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Interestingly, the sudden, unexplained spike in a bunch
| of categories for 2020 is very suspect.
| gilbetron wrote:
| Many of them are probably due to the fact that people
| were less likely to go to the hospital due to fear or
| hospitals being clogged. Patient care took a big hit,
| basically.
| FabHK wrote:
| > suicides and overdoses are up
|
| Do you have reliable statistics on that? Quick ducking
| showed that suicide rates in the US rose during the 2010's,
| but it's hard to find more recent numbers. This article
| claims that suicide rates fell in 2020.
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/03/health/suicide-
| rate-2020-...
| everforward wrote:
| Somebody else posted the overdoses, I think I stand
| corrected on the suicides. They're down overall, but up
| among adolescents and I think my brain extrapolated that
| out to a general increase. My apologies on the bad data!
|
| I'm slightly suspicious of the claim that they fell,
| because it flies in the face of common sense and
| historical trends, but weirder things have happened. It
| just seems strange that amidst a period where people are
| self-reporting increases in mental health issues that the
| suicide rate would drop.
|
| Suicide hotline calls were way up in 2020 [1] (Crisis
| Text Line was up 40%, SAMHSA hotline was up circa 500%).
| Major depressive disorder was up 28% in 2020, and anxiety
| disorders were up 26%. [2]
|
| Perhaps there's a confounding factor here like telehealth
| increasing the availability of and participation in
| mental health treatment. Or maybe the abundance of death
| made people cherish life more.
|
| The cynic in me wonders if the data was massaged to
| maintain support for lockdowns, but I don't have anything
| to substantiate that, so it's not a declaration of fact.
|
| 1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2020/05/04/8478417...
|
| 2. https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/08/mental-health-
| covid19-pa...
| triceratops wrote:
| > It just seems strange that amidst a period where people
| are self-reporting increases in mental health issues that
| the suicide rate would drop.
|
| Maybe the lockdowns brought people closer together with
| roommates and family. Long commutes are awful for mental
| and physical health - widespread WFH cut down on that
| significantly. Home cooking went slightly up[1] which
| improves physical and mental health because of healthier
| eating. People had to do more outdoor recreational
| activities instead of going to malls and bars, and maybe
| that made them healthier and less likely to commit
| suicide.
|
| There are so many confounding factors that it's
| impossible to tease them apart.
|
| 1.
| https://www.fooddive.com/news/survey-7-in-10-consumers-
| say-t...
| everforward wrote:
| We're way into conjecture territory at this point, so I
| don't mean any of this as fact.
|
| What confuses me about theories like that is that self-
| reported mental health issues were up in 2020 [1]. I
| would have thought if it was increased closeness to
| roommates/family or home cooking or recreational
| activities then people would report higher life
| satisfaction and lower rates of mental health issues.
|
| That CDC report even indicates a 4.4% rate of suicidal
| ideation, which is higher than normal.
|
| It might be something we never know, but it does make me
| curious and skeptical. If the data really is correct,
| there might be advances in mental health treatment hidden
| here somewhere, which would be great.
|
| 1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm
| aortega wrote:
| See this article. Theres an updated one with even more
| striking statistics.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/health/drug-overdoses-
| fen...
| hwillis wrote:
| You're responding to a question about suicide with a
| completely different article about opioid deaths, and the
| article itself attributes those deaths to the still-
| increasing substitution of fentanyl, which has nothing to
| do with lockdowns. Yet you're talking about "striking
| statistics" when suicides _did_ decline.
|
| So... a new 22k deaths by overdose, plus 2.5k new
| vehicular deaths, minus 1.7k suicides, vs _522k excess
| deaths_. There were a _total_ of 45,855 recorded deaths
| by suicide. ALL suicides, ALL drug overdoses, and ALL
| traffic fatalities TOGETHER do not add up to half of the
| excess deaths. You 're spewing complete bullshit.
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361
| depaya wrote:
| If someone dies because they cannot get treatment in a
| hospital (because it is full of covid patients) do you not
| consider that death a byproduct of the covid epidemic?
| thrwn_frthr_awy wrote:
| Fwiw a friend mine had a stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis
| that went undetected for months because of COVID. They have
| a 92% chance of dying in the next five years.
|
| My uncle is got final approval for a heart transplant in
| December. We are currently unsure if there will hospital
| room if he gets called this week.
|
| COVID is killing people just fine with or without the
| disease and the unvaccinated by choice need to stop taking
| up hospitals beds.
| refurb wrote:
| Looks at the CDC numbers. Accidental deaths are up several
| fold.
| hwillis wrote:
| You are blatantly lying:
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234
|
| Accidental deaths:
|
| 2018: 167,127
|
| 2019: 173,040
|
| 2020: 192,176
| [deleted]
| an9n wrote:
| Can't be flu can it, because that's miraculously disappeared!
| triceratops wrote:
| What's miraculous about flu disappearing? Most Covid
| countermeasures (masking, distancing) work on flu, we
| already had a flu vaccine, and flu is far less contagious.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| If you call all the measures against covid miraculously,
| sure.
|
| And why would the flu deaths suddenly be up so much
| compared to earlier years? And how would it do that while
| we're looking for it and don't find it?
| ekianjo wrote:
| > This is so easily disproved
|
| Oh, you were checking every dying patient?
| aortega wrote:
| > just look at total deaths for the period. Where do you
| think they are coming from?
|
| People clearly died. Now, the question is, they died directly
| from covid, or died from effects of the lockdown?
| mk81 wrote:
| nsxwolf wrote:
| We seem not surprised that India could undercount millions of
| deaths, but my impression is that China's near-perfect
| suppression of all variants of the virus in their population of
| 1.4 billion is taken at face value. Is it not possible that China
| is also covering up their real death toll?
| rootsudo wrote:
| Of course not, there's no incentive for China to lie. None at
| all, they first established the virus existence, where it came
| from and took appropriate action.
|
| What else do you expect? /s
| eldaisfish wrote:
| The Chinese state has the ability and means to do what few
| other countries can - lock down millions of people and mean a
| lockdown where people are confined to their homes.
|
| There are also millions of Chinese citizens outside china. If
| China were hiding millions of deaths, we would have heard about
| it.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| I've heard anecdotally by a Chinese immigrant that many
| people back home had family members that mysteriously didn't
| make it.
|
| Just the usual "Nothing to see here, move along" that's
| common to authoritarian regimes who would rather sweep things
| under the rug than admit failure.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I can accept their extreme methods could potentially suppress
| outbreaks. But could anything really work this well? And
| shouldn't it have a breaking point - at some point you run
| into something like omicron that spreads so quickly it has to
| overwhelm your ability to track and trace and you can't make
| testing supplies fast enough or hire people to police it fast
| enough.
|
| And if you're not being given good information, how does an
| overseas Chinese individual spot anything amiss? Their parent
| or grandparent dies in China. Well, that's not unusual in
| itself. It's only unusual if it is happening more frequently
| than it should, and if that information isn't being made
| available, how could they know?
|
| COVID is rampant in the United States, yet it doesn't seem
| like my friends parents and grandparents are dying at any
| particularly worrying rate - and yet overall, they absolutely
| are. If the data weren't there, it would be hard to notice
| anything were happening at all. You could lie to me and make
| me think supply chain issues were caused by something else,
| that my occasionally crowded local hospital was seeing a bad
| flu season, etc.
| dirtyid wrote:
| People have extended social circles in PRC that span
| hundreds to thousands depending on connections. Family &
| friends, their acquaintances, coworkers etc. No one I know
| in PRC has or knows of anyone that's tested positive.
| Reports are similar from other PRC diaspora as well.
| Including business owners with thousands of employees.
|
| Whereas every Chinese diaspora knows of someone getting
| covid abroad. Every Indian / Pakistani I know have lost
| people during delta wave back home. Everyone I know in west
| knows someone whose tested positive during omicron. And
| this is with noticeable lockdowns, congested hospitals,
| burning dead bodies on the streets. Versus PRC that has
| been open since mid 2020 except for targeted lockdowns.
|
| There's also other indicators like import case statistics
| that many countries maintained into 2020. The TLDR is while
| flights from North America / EU and other regions were
| transporting massive amounts covid positives in
| repatriation flights early in the pandemic, PRC exported
| very little in the months after Hubei lockdown and then as
| far as I know, none.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Probably not, people would "notice the bodies piling up in the
| corner" and change their behavior if friends and relatives
| start dying and you'd see that in terms of how full restaurants
| are, etc. It's not like the Hunanese government was all that
| good at keeping the scale of the original outbreak secret.
| obelix74 wrote:
| I live in the Bay Area. I just visited my parents who caught
| Covid in November. Nobody wants to get tested in India. If you
| test positive, the local Government gets notified of it and they
| harass you. My father had GI issues so he was in the hospital for
| a week (and hated it), my Mom had mild symptoms. She had to get a
| doctor's note to stay home. Even then, multiple people harassed
| her at home ("we have to sanitize the home" - take money and
| throw random chemicals).
|
| I spent Christmas to Jan 7th in India. I carried a bunch of
| antigen tests and delayed my RT PCR tests till the last day. Did
| not leave home, just spent time with parents.
|
| In general, nobody cares about Covid in India anymore. Every
| family has lost one or more family members (my family lost 7)
| during Delta in April - July 2021, so there is a general
| resignation. The general Hindu / Indian resignation to karma
| kicks in and they have largely moved on.
|
| My parents felt comfortable doing antigen tests with me and not a
| RT PCR - and I don't blame them.
|
| I struggled quite a bit. Relied heavily on Gerson Duckbill N95
| masks. Not surprised by these numbers at all.
| [deleted]
| keskadale wrote:
| > The analyses find that India's cumulative COVID deaths by
| September 2021 were 6-7 times higher than reported officially.
|
| The officially reported number of Covid deaths are ~483k. So
| according to this analysis, the real number of deaths should be
| closer to 3.3 million.
| rg111 wrote:
| I was seeing the image of the funeral pyres, and was thinking
| that this is the easiest way to make a body disappear.
|
| As 70-85% of Indians are Hindus and they burn their deceased, if
| someone wanted to count total number of deaths by dead bodies,
| they would not be able to.
|
| All bodies are gone.
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| Births and deaths are registered with the government.
|
| can't burn in the burning grounds unless a death certificate is
| produced
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Well, there were stories of unburned bodies found floating in
| the rivers, there are many who couldn't afford the cremation.
| There's the official rule (registration needed) and the
| reality on the ground: insufficient government service
| coverage leading to undocumented births and deaths.
|
| Even China has a lot of undocumented births, because of the
| 1-child-policy: https://thediplomat.com/2015/03/chinas-
| hidden-children/ (IMO the accepted "legend" that there were a
| lot of abortions just demonized the Chinese, whether
| nefariously or on purpose)
| hnbad wrote:
| You can't just cremate a corpse by throwing it on some wood and
| pouring gasoline on it. Even proper cremation still leaves
| behind some "scrap" (of course medical devices and prosthetics,
| but also some bones can be very difficult to fully turn to
| ashes).
| panini_tech wrote:
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "I think all governments want to downplay the degree of deaths"
|
| That is really unsupported. There is also the opposite desire,
| e.g. to justify unpopular covid control measures.
|
| Hospitals definitely have a financial incentive to classify any
| death "with covid" as a death "from covid."
| t_minus_4 wrote:
| Clickbaity and really questionable science. The author did 0.1%
| sample survey of adults and asked about covid deaths in the
| family. I am sure a common man is no expert to tell if someone
| died of covid, or with covid or during covid - unless there is a
| medical report. I would not trust any conclusions of phone survey
| of such small size of general population. The paper would have
| more credibility if the looked at health records. I am just
| saying, this is hard problem and the authors of the paper did a
| very lousy job and with questionable standards.
| 101011 wrote:
| Any surveys of India are going to amount to a small sample size
| across the entire population - India is massive.
|
| Also, they're almost certainly undercounting the extremely
| poor, a very sizable group that is going to fall through the
| cracks no matter what standards you're trying to abide by.
|
| There's a reason the title says "may" - there's an
| acknowledgement of room for error here.
|
| The point is, India, in spite of their lack of adequate
| healthcare, are showing mortality rates well below other
| countries. I applaud the attempt to discern what the toll may
| truly be, flawed as it may be.
|
| I'm sure if it was as simple as looking at public health data
| then they wouldn't have spent the money calling people in a
| survey.
|
| I'm fine with people calling out error margins for research,
| but do you really have to say this is lousy clickbaity work?
| nkoren wrote:
| Unfortunately it's too easy to believe this. During the height of
| the delta wave, my old classmates from India were frantically
| sharing tips on our alumnae Whatsapp group on how to source
| ventilators for family members. Everybody had a parent, aunt, or
| uncle in the ICU. Many didn't make it. One classmate reported
| that in the space of a 2-week period, 10 members of his extended
| family had died. This is all anecdotal, but seems indicative of a
| situation that goes far far FAR beyond the official statistics.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This really should not be a surprise. There are many countries
| that have extremely low covid case counts and deaths compared to
| their population and development status. And even some of the
| developed countries get it terribly wrong, for instance, NL,
| where I live has a 50% gap between the official COVID deaths and
| the excess deaths taken over the same period (about 21000
| officially, and about 40000 when looking at excess deaths). The
| government publications, debates and various websites all use the
| first number, only the CBS, the bureau for statistics uses the
| second.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Let's hope somehow all kind of numbers were recorded anyway
| (instead of only one kind reported in mass media) and we can
| get a better picture of what happened in coming years and start
| comparing impacts, costs, benefits, disadvantages of different
| covid policies.
| oblio wrote:
| They are recorded, as part of regular, normal statistics
| (cause of death, etc).
| Zigurd wrote:
| Now that there are good updated numbers on excess deaths, that
| should be observed before saying, for example, that South
| Africa is not suffering much from omicron.
|
| There are some plausible reasons to think omicron is not as
| dangerous as Delta, but it remains very dangerous. The gap
| between official numbers and excess deaths means that,
| unfortunately, South Africa's numbers are not a reliable
| indicator.
|
| The Economist has a web page that tracks excess deaths. I'm
| sure there are others.
| FabHK wrote:
| Yes, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-
| excess-...
|
| And for India, The Economist estimates 1.1 to 7.6 m excess
| deaths, implying 27 to 184 (!) infections per 100 people so
| far.
| logifail wrote:
| > The Economist has a web page that tracks excess deaths. I'm
| sure there are others.
|
| EuroMOMO[0] is one everyone should take a look at.
|
| The "pooled number of deaths by age group" graphs I found
| thought-provoking, particularly the 0-14 years and 15-44
| years graphs.
|
| [0] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
| jnsbck wrote:
| There is a great paper on excess mortality during the COVID-19
| pandemic that also corroborates this for almost every country
| that tracks death count.
|
| https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336
| jacquesm wrote:
| Interesting. Those figures actually do not agree with the
| amount that the Dutch CBS reports, the CBS figures are _much_
| worse than the 12% undercount reported in this paper. But the
| paper is from a while ago already so maybe that explains the
| discrepancy.
| srean wrote:
| I see many comments dissing corrupt doctors and hospitals.
|
| I think this is really unfair and demoralizing to the many in the
| medical profession who have been working in the middle of this
| crisis often at the cost of great personal sacrifices, showing up
| for yet another grueling long day of work, day after day, braving
| lynching and the attitude of the government that does little
| apart from token gestures of flower showers and setting the
| brutality of the police force on medical students should they
| complain about their lot.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIrOLwQtwYo
|
| Disclaimer: I am not in the medical profession
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