How credible is North Korea’s claim that they have no cases?
Are there any estimates or guesstimates for the real Chinese figures? It would be interesting to see some links to reputable sources. I was looking at this thread, “what is the real death toll in China” https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=893152 but the linked video wouldn’t play for me.
For Wednesday’s election, the government of South Korea has updated their infographic on how to vote during the pandemic.
No, not until there’s a vaccine, until the majority of people are actually vaccinated.
But no, it doesn’t have to be that long - if the infection rates drop low enough a partial lifting of the stay-at-home combined with continued social distancing and enhanced hygienic practices could allow greater activity, although not back to normal.
That said - stay-at-home needs to continue for at least a couple months more to keep the medical systems from being (even more) overwhelmed.
There was a significant jump when they started treating suspicious respiratory illness as COVID-19, which indicates that even then they lacked the ability to test everyone who had a suspicious respiratory illness. And I’m seeing the suggestion here that some people in the USA are treating heart failure as COVID-19 – which would seem reasonable in the light of the other suggestion that 4 times as many people as usual are dying from heart failure.
The point is, you don’t have to believe that the Chinese lied about their numbers to believe that the numbers may not be comparable.
I used to read medical research. Cause-of-death figures are notoriously rubbery.
As much as I loath the Indian Government and the dollar store Nazis who run it, testing on its own does not explain it.
Lack of testing would explain asymptomatic and minimally symptomatic cases. Mild*, severe and critical cases would still appear. Hospitals would be overwhelmed. A large number of deaths is difficult to miss, especially since it takes several days from appearance of symptoms for people to die.
Same for China.
*Since even “mild” cases means several days of feeling very bad and being sick enough to be bed ridden.
There are a lot of extremely poor people in India. Do those people usually go to hospital when they get ill, or just suffer and hope to get better? What about those in rural areas, far from the nearest hospital?
Iran doesn’t have an enormous population. It made the news as one of the first large countries outside of China to have a lot of cases, but when this is done, Iran can’t possibly be in the running for “most deaths” or anything like that. Sadly, the US might be.
We observe what happens in other countries that are ahead of the US in this situation and see what happens as they relax restrictions.
I’ve heard speculation that the way we consume movies may never be the same. When quarantine ends, a movie theater is the last place I’ll want to be for a long time.
I use this page to see how the pandemic is progressing in different countries — is there a better page?
Look at “COVID-19 Cases by Country, normalized by country population” 2/3 of the way down the page. U.S.A. is following Italy’s trajectory; only Spain is doing worse: 0.33% of population has confirmed covid-19 (highest in world?). Turkey was hard hit early, but the trajectory may be better now — reporting issue?.
Thailand has imposed a lot of containment rules and is doing fairly well. Is that due to the containment regime? Or mainly due to the hot dry climate?
Yeah, watching a recording of a live show of Jesus Christ, Superstar yesterday made me long for going to see live theater. But I’m pretty satisfied seeing movies in a living room. I’m mostly happy seeing movies on my laptop.
(The show is really good, by the way, and is still free today, but will cost money again after that. It’s one of the many coronavirus streaming specials people are running.)
The number I can’t find, that I’d like to see, is “number of people hospitalized for covid-19”.
That seems the least likely to be distorted by differences in reporting. Of course, different countries have different abilities to hospitalize people, and US hospitalizations aren’t going to be comparable to Indian hospitalizations. But it’s probably fairly comparable across “peer countries”, except for being limited at the top end by running out of beds.
Poor != stupid.
The sub-continents peoples are very mobile and many can go easily to a hospital if need be. Plus all over India (and Pakistan), there are rural health units nearly everywhere, and they are usually the first line of treatment and have the ability to evacuate someone to a bigger hospital if needed.
By way of Daily Kos,
There’s this nursing home/extended stay in Texas lot of old folks live there, something like 87 are corona-positive. The medical expert employed there is handing out the malaria/lupus drug. Sorta kinda practicing medicine. Also, giving it to dementia patients who might be somewhat impaired in their judgement, hence cannot fully consent.
Story at link. Can’t really recommend it, because it put a dark voodoo on my Sunday morning.
The wife of a friend of mine had a baby in Mumbai last week. They had carefully chosen a maternity-only hospital long in advance, but the hospital was closed abruptly because staff tested positive. Their obstetrician managed to pull some strings to try to get another hospital to take them in the 40th week of a high-risk pregnancy, but that hospital refused to take them. I think they ended up at the 4th hospital, where they gave her an unplanned C-section because they decided labor was taking too long and just being in the hospital was risky. They discharged her with the baby 48 hours after the C-section. Her mom was supposed to come from the States to help, but obviously that isn’t happening. And the household help they had hired is unable to come, either, as apparently the lockdown has led to police beating the shit out of people who try to leave their neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, apparently just getting basic foods is an issue, as in markets are running out of dal and rice. So my friend (the dad) basically has to work full-time remotely while caring for a newborn and his post-op wife. The room that was going to be the nursery is essentially unusable because there is some kind of weird platform where a bed would normally go - they had hired someone to build steps up to the platform, but that didn’t happen either, and the mom can’t climb up there while recovering from a C-section. And these are upper middle class professionals who have local family; I can’t imagine how people with fewer resources are coping.
My friend said the migrant laborers who were left stranded when Modi abruptly shut down the railroads have had no choice but to try to walk to their home villages, sometimes many miles, and are being hit by vehicles along the highways.
Regarding India’s low number of deaths:
Have people forgotten what an exponential curve looks like?
Oh, the Indian Government are a bunch of dumbasses who shouldn’t be permitted to run a grocery store. No doubt of that. They do stuff with an eye to the media. The lockdown was this in spades.
I was talking of healthcare access.
Did I say I thought they were stupid? I don’t think so. Try reading what I wrote.
It’s not that they can’t go to hospital, it’s just that they may choose not to. Hospitals are expensive and poor people may decide not to go to avoid running up a big bill that they’ll be paying off for years.
Right. But if multiple hospitals in a gigantic major city are refusing to take patients for relatively routine issues, that also speaks to healthcare access.
Healthcare costs aren’t as crazy as in the US.
I cannot speak for India or Maharastra. But here in Pakistan, they started to shut down nonemergency and urgent cases in hospitals in mid-March.
Your friend was going to an expensive private hospital. It was canceled. Its like having planned on an expensive meal in a high-end restaurant and then finding due to rationing, reservation is cancelled and you have to eat stuff according a ration card, like everyone else. You are getting food, just not what you wanted.
It’s the same. There is access.
True, but your average poor person/family in India are much poorer than the typical US poor. And many of those with severe COVID-19 often spend a long time in hospital. It isn’t just a couple weeks and you’re better. It still could pile up a huge bill (compared to their income), even in India.
