Here’s some news:
(helpful bolding eh)
I heard that remdesivir, while it didn’t reduce mortality, it reduced the hospitalization time of patients.
Ummm… maybe I’m missing something, but if you die, you have to leave the hospital, right?
The UK and EU have now surpassed the US in daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million. I guess I haven’t been following Europe as closely as the US, but this is a bit of a surprise to me. Note, the US still has more overall cases per million, however.
On a positive note, fatality rates are dropping across all three and deaths have been pretty much flat (slight uptick in UK/EU since mid-Sept).
“Taken together, the results suggest that remdesivir shortens the duration of the disease, but does not affect prognosis significantly.”
Younger population and spends more time outdoors.
For pretty much each age cohort 20 to 30% as many cases and deaths. Crowded conditions.
No one has any idea how much covid is in India. In normal times they only record about 20% of deaths. They don’t record (or test) most illnesses.
Yes, it’s a younger population, so they probably have less mortality than we have. Yes, we would know if they were stacking bodies like cordwood – and they aren’t. But their best guess of how many cases they have could be off by a factor of three or four.
Sorry @puzzlegal but your opinion about what is known in India is simply not true. The data (discussed extensively in the Opening Schools thread) comes out of the states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in India’s south. As described in the Science article:
What is known there about how much covid-19 there is if anything is superior and MORE accurate to what is known here.
And again, this is specifically on an age cohort to age cohort comparison. Numbers summarized here from source material in table S10 of here. Mortality rates mostly follow along the incidence rates, roughly a third of U.S. on a per capita per age band for most age bands. (For example the biggest age cohort there is the 18 to 29 year old group and they have 27% of the mortality on a per capita basis than the U.S. has.)
Graphically here in C and E. Log scale.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2020/09/29/science.abd7672/F4.large.jpg
In fact they do have a very good “idea of how much covid is in India”. Their system is not with room for errors but if either country is undercounted it much more likely is the United States.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/11/asia/india-covid-death-rate-explainer-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
This article, from September, suggests that I misremembered what I was told (by a friend who is researching covid and was corresponding with a researcher in India). It says that in ordinary times, 86% of deaths are reported to the government overall, but only 22% are assigned an official cause of death.
Even when India isn’t facing a pandemic, only 86% of deaths nationwide are even registered in government systems. And only 22% of all registered deaths get an official cause of death, certified by a doctor, said community medicine specialist Dr Hemant Shewade.
There are a few reasons behind this. The majority of people in India die at home or other places, not in a hospital, so doctors usually aren’t present to assign a cause of death.
I’m sure the US is undercounting covid deaths, too. But I don’t trust numbers out of India. Not because I think they are lying, but because I think they don’t have the resources to count accurately.
Some parts of India may have better reporting than others. That study may have decent data for the region it covers. India is large, with many states that are at least as different as our states. Some of our states are reporting more accurate data than others, too.
39,586,909 total cases
1,109,130 dead
29,658,575 recovered
In the US:
8,288,278 total cases
223,644 dead
5,395,401 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
I understand that India has done very extensive serology testing all across Delhi, on multiple occasions to get a sense of trends, not to mention exhaustive testing in low-income areas in and around Mumbai. What do you make of those? Unless I’ve just missed the studies, I’ve been under the impression that India has done much more than the US has to try to assess serology on a broad scale. And that they aren’t near the only ones.
The CNN article is a bit funny. They go all over the place, simultaneously claim that India is undercounting cases and that the relatively low mortality rate is because of increased testing?
Their expert is claiming that antibody studies show that India “may be undercounting infections by a factor 50 to 100” while CNN’s own reporting of those numbers show that by antibody positivity it would be the same estimated factor of ten that the U.S. data suggests:
But hey even in CNN’s reporting of the actual data they still credulously quote the same expert who “predicted that the country may be undercounting infections by a factor of 50 to 100”.
By serology studies the confirmed infection rate there is the same fraction of true infections as in the United States which belies any speculation of gross undercounting there. By actual studies in regions there “known for their effective primary healthcare delivery models” with “rigorous disease surveillance and contact tracing” the per capita incidence rate is about 20 to 30% the incidence rate in the United States, compared to the range of the official reports country-wide which for cumulative confirmed cases is running 22.5%.
I can accept suspicion about the attributed death counts there. But by multiple lines of actual evidence the incidence rates there are a small fraction of U.S. rates.
I wasn’t really intending to hold up the CNN article as full of excellent opinions, just as a source for a single fact, the number I’d garbled.
Okay, I don’t believe they have a good handle on counting deaths, but it looks like they are doing at least as well as we are at counting infections. That doesn’t mean I trust their numbers, especially… But I’ll accept their infection count for comparison with our gross undercount.
While we’re discussing how nations are counting infections … very little is heard of China’s numbers anymore. The public-facing reports of their case counts suggest that cases in China have remained statistically flat for going on eight months now.
Is it just conventional wisdom that “everyone knows China’s low COVID-19 numbers are faked”? Or does anyone reputable ever argue that “nope – China actually has beaten this thing within their borders”?
FWIW specific to case fatality rate (which was the item that the chorus of they must be hiding deaths came from) - currently by reported numbers the U.S. and India are neck and neck, likely reflecting that both are now mostly infecting younger lower risk populations. U.S. rolling 7 day daily average at 1.38% and India’s at 1.22%.
fwiw, I don’t think India is hiding anything.
FWIW “hiding” was a poor word choice on my part. It implies intent, which some do think is going on and accuse the Indian government of doing, but you were clearly speaking of being hidden from view by the nature of things there, without implication of an intention to hide.
What I don’t get though about those who bring up the low numbers of registered deaths in India as a reason to doubt their covid mortality rates is why their influenza mortality rates seem to be believed as well as other countries are, year after year, inclusive of pandemic years?
There is occasional reporting of crackdowns where specific Chinese cities are shut down to stomp on an outbreak. That reflects what other countries who have successfully driven it down to low figures are also doing. This is not an option where like Europe and the US, its just awash in the population generally.
An observation that would suggest they are not fiddling the books too much is the genuine absence of cases being exported. Australia and other countries continue to receive people from China, mainly expats returning home. If the virus was really widespread there would be a much higher incidence of virus appearance during the mandatory 14 day quarantines at their destination.
In other news - the first, very limited steps have been taken for opening a trans-Tasman Sea travel bubble between Australia and New Zealand. NZ has 42 active cases, all being in quarantine or isolation, and effectively eradicated in the community. Australia has about 225 active cases.
As of Friday New Zealanders have been able to fly into Australia without having to quarantine when they come in. They will still have to do the 14 days on their return.