Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[alfred russel]

100% of the vaccine recipients have been tested. 

Is that true? I missed that if it was reported -- and i'm actually not even sure what that would mean. Are they being regularly tested, or just at a point in time?

If they have all been tested, then they aren't comparable to tests in the general population because the general population generally shows up for tests only with a reason (such as being sick). I'd expect the tested general population to be far higher in terms of positive tests in that situation even if the group received a placebo in lieu of a vaccine.

[Admiral Yi]

Is that true? I missed that if it was reported -- and i'm actually not even sure what that would mean. Are they being regularly tested, or just at a point in time?

If they have all been tested, then they aren't comparable to tests in the general population because the general population generally shows up for tests only with a reason (such as being sick). I'd expect the tested general population to be far higher in terms of positive tests in that situation even if the group received a placebo in lieu of a vaccine.

Maybe you're right.  Maybe I made an unwarranted assumption.

But explain to me again why 0.04% is not obviously better than 1.19%.

[mongers]

No doubt Shelf would also see this as very good news:

The percentage of over-50s vaccinated has hit 95% in England, NHS data shows.

The take-up among those aged 45-49 is at 59% after they started being offered the jab earlier this month.

By vaccinated I presume they mean one or both jabs.

[alfred russel]

Maybe you're right.  Maybe I made an unwarranted assumption.

But explain to me again why 0.04% is not obviously better than 1.19%.

On reason:

Because 1.19% in the (mostly) unvaccinated population was the incidence of covid observed over the full 13 or so months we've had covid.

0.04% in the vaccinated population has only been observed after the vaccines were administered. I don't know the timing of vaccine administration in India, but the bulk may have been very recently.

[alfred russel]

And actually, googling this, it seems that is probably the case.

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/india-vaccine-policy-covid-19-serum-covaxin-7283776/

There were more vaccines distributed from April 1 through April 19 than the rest of the year combined. In the month of March, vaccines administered were about 450% higher than January through March combined.

The average indian that has been vaccinated just got vaccinated.

That doesn't at all mean the vaccines don't work--there are a zillion other factors, among which the zillion poor people in India probably have not been vaccinated and are probably almost excluded from the testing regime--but they count in the denominator of the total population.

[viper37]

Canada bans's flights from India and Pakistan.
A totally worthless measure, and there are still no serious controls at the point of entry.
Link

[Admiral Yi]

On reason:

Because 1.19% in the (mostly) unvaccinated population was the incidence of covid observed over the full 13 or so months we've had covid.

0.04% in the vaccinated population has only been observed after the vaccines were administered. I don't know the timing of vaccine administration in India, but the bulk may have been very recently.

I get where you are coming from.  However this does raise one question I don't know the answer to.

If a person has previously contracted covid, then recovered, do they then test positive or negative?

[jimmy olsen]

India is melting down

https://mobile.twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1385355480978104322

https://mobile.twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1385324157332766728

[jimmy olsen]

Dire

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/22/india-covid-deaths-collapse-modi-barkha-dutt/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

Opinion: India is collapsing under a second wave of coronavirus. Callousness and incompetence are killing us.

Barkha Dutt
April 23, 2021 at 3:31 a.m. GMT+9

In 2020, it was the sight of millions of daily-wage workers walking on the national highways of India, fleeing the cities for their villages, that defined the covid-19 crisis in the country. Now, in 2021, the country's blundering, callous and shortsighted response to a second wave is chillingly captured at overrun graveyards and cremation grounds.

The second wave of covid-19 is sweeping through India with the ferocity of an inferno; misplaced triumphalism, complacency and willful incompetence have brought us to our knees. And the official numbers — India just reported the world's largest single-day spike, with more than 300,000 coronavirus cases over the last 24 hours and more than 2,100 deaths — do not even begin to tell us the truth.

In Surat, Gujarat, a cremation site that had been closed for 15 years was reopened because the city ran out of places to burn the dead. At the Ramnath Ghela funeral grounds, the iron bridges in the furnaces have melted and corroded from the round-the-clock pyres being lit on it. The undertakers at the grounds said they are burning at least a 100 bodies a day. The official numbers for the entire state in the same week placed the fatalities at 78.


In Ghaziabad, an industrial town not even an hour from New Delhi, I saw bodies wrapped in white sheets in the back of rickety old cars. It can take an entire day before space opens up for a cremation. I counted 20 bodies in a single hour, on a day when the official data placed the casualties at eight.

We may never know for sure how many lives are lost to the virus.

In cities across India, the tragedy is the same: Hospitals are turning away patients because they no longer have beds, oxygen is scarce, medicine is not available at pharmacies, ventilators are nowhere to be found and patients run out money trying to get treated.

In this hour of national emergency, high-flow oxygen is the most critical shortage, since it is the only therapeutic treatment that helps patients live. Its absence has led to hospitals to petition courts for intervention and even beg for it online.


"It's gold dust," a doctor told me wryly, "everyone wants it and there's none to be had." Another doctor on the front line shared horrifying instances of patients having to share one concentrator between them as their oxygen levels plummeted.

Patients are asked to sign consent forms before admission to some hospitals, accepting the risk that they may die from insufficient supply of oxygen. It is the 2021 version of signing your own death warrant.

Inside a pediatric intensive care unit in Mumbai, I saw an 18-day-old infant strapped to a ventilator machine, trembling every few minutes from the impact of all the cables and gadgets plugged into her tiny frame. Nine of the 17 children admitted here since April 1 are seriously ill. Soonu Adani, a pediatrician, told me that "in 2020, children rarely needed to be hospitalized, now it's very different."

Many of those dying during this second wave seem much younger overall. At funeral sites, almost all the deaths I reported have been people under the age of 50; some were in their late 20s.

Through this carnage, in a galling example of tone-deafness, election rallies — mammoth gatherings in the hundreds of thousands — had not been canceled in the eastern state of West Bengal until just a few days ago. Even then, they were just scaled down and not scrapped.

The Modi government has made many fatal errors. It had no contingency in place for the pandemic's second wave. The vaccine rollout was inexplicably slow. Bureaucrats dragged their feet on clearances of foreign-made vaccines, losing two critical months. So confident were they of having fought off the first wave that vaccines were exported or gifted to smaller countries, making people, including myself, feel a misplaced sense of pride when we could ill afford it.

But nothing was more galling than to see our politicians, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, continue to address political gatherings as people are dying and our hospitals are collapsing. Modi's decisions to call off the campaign should have come much earlier.

It all hit home for me this week, as I rode with my father, a diabetes patient in his 80s, in an ambulance to the ICU. The severe crunch on the health system made my family decide to use a private ambulance. When it arrived, it had a one-man crew, the driver. There was no paramedic. It turned out that the single oxygen cylinder in the ambulance (which we had to use during traffic, which is made worse by the random barricades placed by the police to check whether citizens are breaking the lockdown) did not work. By the time we got to hospital, my father's oxygen had fallen dangerously low.

It was my incredible privilege that allowed us to finally secure an ICU bed.

Then I thought of the countless families I have talked to in the past few weeks across India, who never even had that fighting chance.

In all our anger and grief, Indians deserve answers. There must be accountability. How did we get to this point?

Heads must roll. As a doctor told me: "when someone dies because you could not provide him oxygen, that is not a natural death; this is murder."

[DGuller]

Any excess death figures available for India, with or without commas?

[jimmy olsen]

Any excess death figures available for India, with or without commas?

I'm sure there must be some, but would they be available for the last month?

[Jacob]

Modi seemed to have fucked this up pretty bad.

[Zoupa]

I don't think so...

Realclearpolitics says that India has 16,257,164 confirmed cases. The first result I see on google says they have 1,369,699,147 people, meaning 1.19% have tested positive. That means about 0.09% per month we've been going through this...

If they just started really ramping up vaccine numbers in India, and you assume a several week lag in testing reporting, it isn't obvious that 0.04% positive is really better than the overall population. It probably is - especially since covid is currently exploding in India, but the only thing to really conclude is the info provided is stupid.

You need to compare like with like.

Exactly right, hence the need for a control group. The scientific method is there for a reason.

[Tamas]

Modi seemed to have fucked this up pretty bad.

It will take a lot of anti-Muslim violence to recover his ratings.

[Josquius]

Indias numbers are scary.
Especially considering they probably aren't testing very well.