India seems to be getting hit particularly badly by the Wuhan coronavirus right now, with over 400,000 new cases in 24 hours. The weird thing about India is that the peak curves differ from those of the U.S. American cases had their first peak mid-July, then fell off before rising again in the fall. India’s peaked in mid-September, fell off, were low all winter, and then started a precipitous rise that’s continued to today.
I don’t know what caused the differing curves, when other nations in the northern hemisphere seemed to experience infection curves mores like the U.S. The summer monsoon season, perhaps?
There’s an Indian coronavirus variant, but it’s unclear how widespread it is or whether it’s driving the surge.
Here’s a thread that suggests India’s pandemic is even worse than those numbers suggest:
During non-pandemic year 2019
About 27,000 Indians died on typical day
Crematoriums handle that level of deaths every day
Additional 4,000 deaths won't knock them off their feet
Crematoriums across the country reporting 2-4X normal business
2/4
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) May 9, 2021
You might say — woah, that's high
In US its about 0.6% and India has a younger population
BUT
Indian healthcare system has collapsed,
People dying for lack of oxygen
So IFR of 1% is reasonable, may even too low
Which would put daily infections at 2.5 to 5M / day
4/5
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) May 9, 2021
There's an old saying in global health
You can ignore, fail to test for, or undercount whatever disease you want
But you can't ignore the dead
In India, the dead are telling us the disease is much worse than the official statistics
And we have to listen
Fin
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) May 9, 2021
I don’t know what is driving India’s sudden surge. They do seem to have a much lower vaccination rate than the U.S..
Here’s a piece from the Times of India talking about how Chinese scientists talked about weaponizing coronavirus back in 2015.
Tags: China, coronavirus, Foreign Policy, India, Wuhan