India has about 3% of its population over 60
USA has about 20%
Italy - over 25%
They’re not going to get nearly as many serious cases. In many places (including a lot of the west) cases are primarily being caught on the grounds that they’re among the most serious cases, with pneumonia etc
India has a life expectancy about 10 years less than the US. You might ask why. Assuming that the mortality rate for Covid-19 is simply a function of years is unlikely to work. For a start I would take the US mortality rate for each decade of life and drop it a decade for India. Probably get you a better estimate. Add to that the lack of hospital capacity per capita. It isn’t going to be good.
Maybe the flattening has begun? I only trust the death stats (at least in the US). According to the Worldometers website, the US deaths per day has dropped two days in a row. That’s about 10 days from the day when the NBA canceled games (my marker for when isolation started to get serious).
The thing to watch out for on that website is that they constantly update the numbers during the day.
Many countries give one daily consolidated report, but it seems that the US reports are partial and at different times, so today’s numbers will usually be too low until the end of the day.
The response is mostly piecemeal, state by state, and it’s uneven. It’s great that New York, California, Nevada, and Illinois are imposing “draconian” restrictions, but people are still getting out and about even in these places, and you have another 46 states that aren’t doing nearly as much. Airports are still open. Highways still have lots of traffic.
As this crisis progresses, let’s think about how many of Trump’s officials, secretaries, and directors in key roles are “acting” directors, “acting” secretaries," and “acting” officials. The OPM director was just forced out - by a 29-year-old Trump loyalist and all-around frat boy who had been previously forced to resign over ethical concerns. It’s comforting to know who’s influencing personnel decisions at a time like this, and I’m sure we can all rest easy and feel reassured that “only the best people” have been put into place to handle this situation.
“I can handle things, I’m smart. Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart, and I want respect!”
I think you could make a case for U-line ( a company mentioned in a quoted article) being an essential business. Essential goods still need to be transported. That means they need to be packaged and packed. And companies need the supplies in order to do that.
U-line also sells respirators and protective masks. We were actually looking at them in the U-line catalog yesterday.
That said, it seems like there are a lot of commercial/industrial businesses that are still running and I guess to some extent they have been deemed essential. I noticed that plumbers and electricians, for example, have been deemed essential.
Yes, if you have a pipe burst or a breaker go bad, you need to be able to get someone to fix it. But the bulk of what electricians and plumbers do is new construction. And there is a huge supply chain of factories and distributors behind them, providing the materials that they need.
I was in that business until a couple of months ago, and I’m disturbed that some of these businesses still seem to be open.
You might need an electrician to replace your circuit breaker, but does the circuit breaker factory need to stay open? It might, especially if the governments are building out temporary hospitals. And they might also make parts needed for ventilators.
A lot of what we do as a society is essential. And we you start digging into what businesses are essential, and the products and services they need in order to stay open, it’s a really long list. We actually haven’t shut down THAT much of the economy, just a highly visible sector involving entertainment and luxury consumer goods.
I didn’t suggest and am not suggesting that U-Line should close. If you thought I was saying that, then I welcome the opportunity to clarify. Yes, they are an essential business. I’m talking about this attitude:
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson just announced that they are sending letters to 1.5m people with underlying health conditions or who take immunosuppressant drugs telling them they should try not to leave their homes for 12 weeks. They are going to set up hubs around the country to offer them delivery of free food and prescription medicine - and they are using the army to coordinate the logistics. Quite a good idea I think - but will see how smoothly it goes.
Unfortunately, I’m skeptical that the kind of coordinated “draconian” response you’d hope for is just not possible. Not to say that Trump couldn’t do a lot more, but the nature of the country (geographically, politically, and socially) makes me think that this was inevitable. I mean, Italy has daily news all over the country about deaths, and Italians are STILL apparently breaking quarantine. Never mind the hazards in giving Trump the powers he would need to even consider starting.
I honestly don’t think that anyone (okay, most) would question such measures if there were a sense that they could be implemented and would work (and had any confidence of support afterward).
I’m not sure what to do, myself, but wishing for some kind of national lockdown with troops enforcing a shelter in place decree across the continent, like Reddit seems to, doesn’t seem like a good use of emotional resources.
Holy cow, Worldometer has US Covid-19 cases up 14,550 so far today. And I know reporting happens throughout the day, so it’s going to climb higher by this evening. When I looked yesterday, there were ~20k cases, now it’s almost double that. Ouch!
Edit: most of the increase is New York, with >12k cases alone.