They are literally running out of fuel to burn their dead. That’s like the peak of the crisis in NYC.
Yes, it sounds like it is dire. That’s also going to happen at a lower death rate than in NYC or elsewhere, since the system is built for capacity where the average age is like 27 rather than 40.
I am not making that point to say it is less bad, obviously if you have a bunch of 40 and 50 years olds rather than 60 and 70 year olds filling up the crematoria, that’s a huge problem. It is more the point that it might actually be worse with that outcome. Comparisons fail for a lot of reasons.
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Yikes, another big increase in cases reported yesterday, up to 380k.
I don’t find this comforting at all. Your picture is of a bunch of giant terrifying waves, and then India just starting to climb up something, not having yet reached the inflection point in the ascent. Maybe that something won’t be a giant wave? But the only exception you provide is Germany’s first wave.
If it ends up being a giant wave, then the total case count for India would climb from from 13k per million (what they are claiming though it’s probably higher) to 60k-100k per million (what the rest of us have gone through)… Which would make their total cases would climb by 18M to I don’t know 80M-140M… or something like that?
That’s like… the entire pandemic playing out all over again just in India, including presumably a whole bunch of new Indian variants.
And assuming that they were and are undercounting doesn’t really change this much. It’s bad news either way. Unless a lot of vaccine gets there fast, I guess.
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They already seem to have some nasty variants. 
India could be a warning for where Africa might be in a few months. .
I really really hope you’re wrong but worry you may be right.
South America doesn’t have as many total people, so it’s not making headlines, but it’s looking pretty grim, too.
ETA: Actually, Brazil’s numbers seem to have come down a bit. I take it back.
I’ve heard no news about anyplace in africa. And with the focus on India, I wonder about Pakistan, haven’t heard anything about them either.
@meep probably has the deets.
Not personally, but I went and looked them up on Our World in Data:
So here’s India v Pakistan: [sorry the colors are so close, but I have no way of changing that in their system]
So it looks like Pakistan got a wave in 2020, but while the two countries abut, the population density of Pakistan is much lower overall than India’s, and even restricting it to cities, Pakistan is lower density than India. I would have expected India to be worse sooner, but it wasn’t.
Here’s the country profile page:
If I want to compare countries, I generally go to Our World in Data first.
General comment on data: it is very difficult to really make comparisons between countries, given the quality of the data can be very different. It’s not just a matter of capacity for testing, yadda yadda, but that many countries did not have good basic mortality stats systems in pre-pandemic times. So I’m generally distrustful of datasets from those countries.
So perhaps India was worse than Pakistan sooner - we just don’t have the stats for it.
The UK added India to the red list.
That means total ban of any incoming travellers unless citizens or residents. And if you are citizen/resident, you have to do a mandatory 10 day hotel quarantine (£1,800 per person).
India is much worse than what is being “reported”.
350,000 positives/day = 1,000,000+/day when you adjust for the positivity rate (20% right now).
Deaths lag infections by 2-3 weeks, so we are likely going to see 5,000+ deaths (reported) per day in 2 weeks or so.
Yikes. New world record: 403,000+ new reported cases.
This is likely due to super-spreader events that Modi encouraged.
Looks like India will over-take Brazil/US in terms of cases/deaths eventually.
I previously congratulated India’s media for not participating in the “confirmed cases” mythology so prevalent in the West. Even today, the U.S. press cites India’s official count of 380,000 new cases a day and notes the Trump-reproving fact that this means India is approaching the U.S. total. Uh huh. With thousands of Indians dying for want of hospital oxygen, with its crematoria unable to keep up, a reader not wishing to reside in la-la land might want to know that realistic modeling indicates India’s true daily new infection rate exceeds 13 million.
…
This lesson is recurring: We’ve always had less of a handle on Covid than we like to think until it explodes on a local hospital system. Which brings us back to the place it started, China, whose story is far from over however much our shortsighted press wants to believe otherwise.Vaccine data (likely reliable for a change) show that 1.18 billion Chinese have yet to receive a single dose. China, with its vast agglomerations of urban poverty, is a lot closer socioeconomically and demographically to India than to the U.S. or Europe, except in one respect: The average age in India is 27; in China, it’s a U.S.-like 37. A study shortly after Wuhan estimated that outbreaks in the 28 biggest U.S. cities would require 26 ICU beds per 100,000 people – a figure that most Western societies, including the U.S., already met. In China, the number of ICU beds per 100,000 was 3.6 at the start of 2020; in India, it was 2.3.
China also has advantages: huge financial reserves and a degree of regime competence that India lacks, plus better-controlled borders. But China’s desperate fight to keep Covid out of its sprawling urban populations is likely not a one- or two-year fight as it builds up its healthcare capacity and vaccinates a billion citizens. It’s a fight that may last half a decade or more and whose success is far from assured.
Australia and NZ are still doing a 14 day quarantine. The cost is similar but if you go as a couple, the second person increases the total only by a third (AU3000 to AU4000).
Just heard that Australia is actually banning its own citizens from returning if they have spent any of the last 14 days in India. Not even a hotel quarantine possible. Just outright ban.
I am scratching my head on how that could be legal.
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There was an AO poster whose fiancée had family in India. Not sure if he ever migrated over here. I was thinking about him the other day and hoping her family is okay.
My dentist has friends and family in India. I just had my teeth cleaned today. She’s pretty worried about it.
It was pretty depressing talking with her. This person died. That person died at home of not-covid because it’s too dangerous to go to the hospital, and at least this way they could be with family when they died. That person got it but had recovered. These’s other two people died. These people didn’t get treated because the hospital wanted to save the resources for people more likely to recover…
India is doing a decent job of vaccinating people, but the vaccines that have access to are AstraZeneca and something developed in India. The latter is, i think, just a dead-virus vaccine, and so is a lot less effective than the RNA vaccines we have. (It should give less immunity than recovering from covid, which gives less immunity than the RNA vaccines.) And there are rumors that if you catch covid shortly after getting it, before your immune system has processed the vaccine, it can make the course of the illness worse.
Also, she’s worried that the Indian manufacturers may be less careful in producing vaccine for local use than for the international market, and whether the AZ vaccine they have is as good as what the rest of the world has. She said, “i grew up in India. The quality of Indian cotton available in the US is so much better than what’s available in India. And it’s like that for everything.”
And “things are so bad right now in India, it’s hard to remember that we’re doing pretty well right now, here.”