India

[Baileysforchristmas]

How on earth are India going to get there numbers down? If they impose to harsher lockdown people will starve to death. I think virus was quietly spreading in February when everyone was saying how well India was doing.

www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/21/delhi-warns-hospitals-running-out-of-oxygen-amid-indias-devastating-covid-wave

Vaccinations are their only hope. I think the RoW will be lucky to get any more covax shipments out of India for the foreseeable future - they're going to need it all!

Agree lockdowns are inappropriate for developing countries - the Economist had a good article on this last year.
Lockdown in developing countries is starving the poor to protect the rich and it's never going to be possible to lockdown a billion people who need to work to feed their families. There were some awful stories about this during India's first lockdown - www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/world/asia/coronavirus-india-lockdown.html

I guess they throw everything at vaccination and let it take its course. The situation with covid does look grim but this should be put in a context where a large proportion of India's population have never had access to good healthcare even to treat easily preventable illnesses and for those people whether or not the healthcare system is overwhelmed by covid is an academic question.

India has over a billion people - I don’t think that it’s logistically possible (from manufacture to in arms) for them to rely on vaccines to get them out of this surge.

Sadly I think we’re going to see very stark differences in how they are forced to manage their wave compared to ours.

This is so sad 😞 not all cases are reported so the situation is much worse than the data reported

www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/21/system-has-collapsed-india-descent-into-covid-hell

www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-56811315.amp

It's heartbreaking. It seems like the case numbers and death numbers are being massively under reported, too.

It's shocking that Modi has carried on doing his huge rallies. So irresponsible. They shouldn't have allowed the Kumbh Mela to go ahead either.

On a positive note, it seems that there is evidence that Covaxin (India's home grown vaccine) may be effective against the new Indian variant. Not sure what the evidence is yet for Covishield/AZ. Either way, vaccinating a population that size is no mean feat. And a lot of vaccination centres have been running out of vaccines.

It’s heartbreaking . I wondered in the beginning why they were not hit so hard , but as someone pointed out they probably were not even testing

I know people moan here but in a lot of countries testing is not readily available , they are not sequencing the variants , and not recording deaths from covid either . With what we know now that is just a recipe for disaster .

Just been reading about this. Terrifying. Apparently younger people are being hospitalised and dying in greater numbers.

Gosh 65%of hospital patients under 40 .

They done have an obesity problem there either do they .

Bloody hell I knew it was high but not that high (given overall numbers are increasing)

@StealthPolarBear

Just been reading about this. Terrifying. Apparently younger people are being hospitalised and dying in greater numbers.

Yes, I was reading a tragic story earlier about a healthy 22yo with no underlying conditions, a mother of one, who died because her family just weren't able to get her a hospital bed/access to the oxygen that she needed. Utterly tragic, but probably being repeated again and again all over the country.

We have been watching the situation closely as DH's family are all in India. I'm so worried about them, and so angry that the government has done so little to manage the situation. It's terrifying.

I know people here hated the lockdowns, and of course, we have a different infrastructure in this country, but ultimately, this is what happens when the virus is left to rip through the population and health care systems get overwhelmed.

Yes very good point. I am guilty of lockdown boredom and wanting to 'live with it' once rates are low (with effective test and trace) but I really take the point.. I have a very good friend with family in India, I don't want t ask :(

I reckon we're all bored of lockdowns @StealthPolarBear, and perhaps with a half-way decent test and trace system, we could have had less time in them.

It's just so awful watching what's going on. People being forced to share hospital beds because there isn't enough space. Bodies being cremated on the pavement because the crematoriums don't have the capacity. I don't think we have any idea what the actual numbers are because there is so much under reporting.

I'm sorry that your friend has family there too. It's hard to know whether to ask or not, isn't it? You don't want to seem uninterested, but you don't want to make people worry more than they already are either. DH is talking to friends and family every day. Some after terrified and some are completely blasé about it all. A bit like it has been here, I guess.

I'm finding it quite hard to switch off from it.

There seems to be a lot of vaccine hesitancy too, unfortunately.

Not that we necessarily know how well the vaccines will do against these new variants anyway.

It’s heartbreaking. Social media is full of people begging for help and leads for hospital beds/treatments for ill family members.

@lurker101

It’s heartbreaking. Social media is full of people begging for help and leads for hospital beds/treatments for ill family members.

Yes, I read one story about a journalist essentially documenting his own demise on Twitter. He was tweeting the chief minister of his state, updating on his declining oxygen levels and asking why he couldn't get medical help. He passed away shortly after his last tweet.

It's shocking to see the pleas for help on social media, and the desperate relatives trying to locate hospital beds, oxygen supplies and medication. However, I feel for the poor who don't even have access to the internet to advocate for their loved ones.

It's sad, but India is a 3rd world country.

Most people are very poor without adequate housing yet alone access to medical care.
The cases we hear about are probably the tip of the iceberg.
Nobody seems to be interested in the fact that TB is rife as well as typhoid - these are illnesses that have been almost eradicated in western society.

@Ylvamoon

It's sad, but India is a 3rd world country. Most people are very poor without adequate housing yet alone access to medical care. The cases we hear about are probably the tip of the iceberg. Nobody seems to be interested in the fact that TB is rife as well as typhoid - these are illnesses that have been almost eradicated in western society.

@Ylvamoon, I don't think it's true any more to say that most Indian people are very poor. Yes, there are still huge problems with poverty, but it isn't the majority of the population at all. And yes, there are some long-standing public health issues and access to healthcare is certainly limited for a lot of Indians, particularly in rural areas and city slums, but not for many of the middle class Indians who are currently struggling to find hospital beds for their sick relatives.

I'm sure you're right that the cases we are hearing about are only the tip of the iceberg, but that only makes it even more of a catastrophe that's about to happen.

@paralysedbyinertia
Child malnutrition is a huge issue in India though. 38% of under 5s have stunted growth. That’s one of the worst figures in the world. This got worse during lockdown as government programs were paused. I agree that in many ways India isn’t a poor country and there’s a rich middle class but a huge proportion of the population is poor enough that they can’t feed their children adequately (though one of the causes of malnutrition is diarrhoea caused by poor sanitation). The answer for India can’t be to prevent the poor earning enough to feed themselves so that the middle classes have a better chance of finding a hospital bed which would never have been available to the poor anyway.

It’s startling as not long ago articles were at the opposite end of spectrum

www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/02/01/962821038/the-mystery-of-indias-plummeting-covid-19-cases?t=1619026516513

I read it was 800 million people in India live on less than $2 a day, that is more than the whole of the population of Europe.

www.soschildrensvillages.ca/news/poverty-in-india-602

Oh gosh, I'm not denying the scale of poverty in India at all. My DH comes from that background, half of his immediate family are illiterate and despite our best efforts, I suspect that most of the children in his family are still malnourished.

My point was that this crisis is hitting rich middle class Indians who live lives like yours and mine. It's easy to other them by saying that most of the population live in poverty anyway, but the truth is, a lot of the people who are suffering right now would have every expectation of getting excellent medical care when they are ill.

Yes, there is a whole layer of Indian people for whom a lack of access to healthcare is the norm, and that's awful. Again, I see this in my own family. However, that is not the experience of all Indians. The current situation is not the norm.

And if the middle classes have no access to healthcare, there is fuck all hope for the poor.

@paralysedbyinertia we know it will effect everyone but the poor will be effected far more. how are India going to deal with it? lockdown means millions of people could starve to death or lockdown will save the rich from dying from Covid?

Lockdowns have not been very successful at saving lives in developing countries probably because without state support people will work and gather anyway and western style lockdowns just can't be sustained - Peru's deaths are worse than Brazil's for example despite it having some very harsh lockdowns. From our experience lockdowns need to be very severe in order to work at all. So India could do another lockdown which may have very little impact on cases but would plunge a lot of people into starvation level poverty.

Clearly no easy answers though.

The poor don't count, they have no voice, that's the point I tried to make.

India is one of the worst affected countries in the world when it comes to TB... a lung condition. Add covid-19 to the mix and you have a toxic mix that will kill in triple fingers within a short time.... yet nobody is concerned about this.

The cases look bad but India has a population of a billion so we were in a far worse position re number of cases back in January / was it 60,000 at one point for our population of 70 million ?. The hospital situation does sound terrible though in that article.