How long before the UK become India

[Dandylioness1]

The scenes coming from India right now are petrifying.

Takes me back to the scenes from Italy last year.

My question, how long do you think we have until we are seeing similar scenes here.
Do we need to be prepared for this?

India is a third world country with a shit health system and not even close to having a significant amount of people vaccinated...

Why the fuck would UK be like this when half of our population are vaccinated?!

This

I don't believe we will.

Sorry to be a complete twat about this but I keep seeing people everywhere saying "third world country".

Forgive me if I am wrong but I thought that it is "wrong" to say that now because it insinuates that there is a second world (eg Communist countries USSR)

Have I got the wrong end of the stick??

You only have to look at the difference between excess deaths and Covid deaths for other countries to understand that the official death rate in India is unlikely to be accurate: www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker

Thanks for this link.

I really like the way the data is displayed.

@StarCat2020 nope you're absolutely right.

Did we have healthy people hoarding oxygen and buying off the black market? India’s problems are huge, nothing like the UK

www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/26/doctors-sound-warning-over-oxygen-hoarding-as-india-reports-record-covid-cases-and-deaths

Even allowing for some under reporting, the proportion of cases and deaths in India remains a lot lower than many other countries. The main problem they face is that their health system cannot cope.

I am glad to see that some countries are sending supplies to India to help them.

I don't think we will see similar scenes as those in India, for all the reasons other posters have mentioned. However I don't think it is scaremongering to be concerned about the possibility of mutations and variants occuring when so many people have the virus at the same time. I appreciate that not all mutations will lead to a virus that is more deadly or contagious. I am sure those who work in this area are keeping a watchful eye on things.

@AlecTrevelyan006 how will we ever know what the numbers are? about 25 million births are not even registered in India, that means at least the same amount of deaths aren’t registered. I think it’s been spreading since the first wave, it’s only now it’s hit the middle classes.

Did we have healthy people hoarding oxygen and buying off the black market?

That's not our culture. However there were many who needed access to oxygen and didn't get it in the first wave.

@figuresomethingout exactly that’s why we won’t see the scenes we’re seeing from India, i’m not saying theIK doesn’t have its problems but we are long way off as turning into India as the title of this thread says
“How long before the UK becomes India” I think that will be never.

Fair enough. I thought you were suggesting no one had to buy oxygen everyone who needed it got it in a timely manner.

I don’t think we will.

I'm waiting for Modi to announce the building of some Nightingale "hospitals".

@GrumpyHoonMain

India has fewer deaths and hospital admissions per 1m population than the UK, even now. What you’re seeing now isn’t some superstrength Indian varient killing everyone, you’re seeing what happens when even a tiny fraction of a 1bn population begins to need urgent hospital care from a 2-tier healthcare system that has consistantly been under-invested.

India probably has more hospitals than any other country on earth but that’s about it. Most of them don’t have ICU capability, you still need to work hard to source and buy your own meds because qualified dispensing pharmacists are few and far between, and there is a 2-tier medical qualification (5 year vs 3/4 year) system so all the best grads go to private hospitals. So of course that’s where anyone who has money will choose to go, overwhelming them.

Read this OP, nothing more really needs to be said. I hope you manage to overcome your anxiety

The part^^ about "soldiers would be needed to guard hospitals over-run with covid patients" gives a flavour of how bad it was expected to get here:

@PrincessNutNuts it could’be got bad here but not like India, there was a video of a dead body falling out of an ambulance as it went round the corner, they left it there. A man left his mums dead body on the street, they’ve run out of stretchers and are carrying dead bodies in sheets ton the temporary morgue

@Puzzledandpissedoff

We all remember the scenes from China & Italy last year

Yes, and as I've already mentioned twice, a number of the images touted by the media have turned out to be downright lies - and that's without the extremely selective reporting and cherry picking of the worst "facts" without context

That doesn't mean that it's all a lie of course, or that Covid isn't a genuine problem, but as a matter of interest do you actually look into these things, or just swallow the media's narrative without thought?

Which images “touted” by the media have turned out to be lies? The only misleading images I know of are the ones on social media of a silent outpatients department at 8pm claiming this shows there is no Covid... The role of the media in showing us what doctors were having to deal with was immensely important

timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/covid-19-of-15000-virus-sequences-11-comprise-of-uk-sa-and-brazil-variants-uk-strain-dominant-in-india/articleshow/82240938.cms

Shows the perfect storm of the variants in India.

I think part of the problem is that there is a disconnect sometimes with how bad it was here in January with the Kent variant (and how bad that one is (www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michigan-record-breaking-number-children-have-been-hospitalized-covid-n1264986 shows what is happening in Michigan - this is OUR variant, the one that we have already had)

So no we wont see India because we have had it - we now need to carefully decide the next steps (mainly with opening borders)

@starcat2020 correct. It is outdated.

Which images “touted” by the media have turned out to be lies? The only misleading images I know of are the ones on social media of a silent outpatients department at 8pm claiming this shows there is no Covid... The role of the media in showing us what doctors were having to deal with was immensely important

That’s not quite true. Reports of “wards full of children with covid” in the UK turned out to be not true.

Which images “touted” by the media have turned out to be lies?

See my post at 09.56 on Saturday, Longtalljosie - or if you prefer google "fake Covid images" which is instructive. Admittedly some sources are more reputable than others, which is why I tried to stick to the better ones

And yes, I'd forgotten "the matron's" infamous claims about the "wards full of children". At least those were quickly pulled by the media, but not before the explosion of hyperbolic threads which resulted

The role of the media in showing us what doctors were having to deal with was immensely important

Forgot to say that I agree with this completely; as they say, a picture's worth a thousand words

Worth remembering what some journalists will do in pursuit of the "best picture" though. I'm reminded of when they were visiting a different hospital every day, and reports came out of staff being manipulated into giving preferred quotes - to say nothing of whether those journalists were getting in the way of vital work, or the risk to themselves of catching the virus while there

I know it's the Daily Mail, but this is their leading story right now...

India Covid: Second wave 'far more infectious and far more deadly'
mol.im/a/9514787

New Delhi had 50% of the cases as the Kent Variant at the end of March so it would be likely that is the variant there which is known to be both more infectious and more deadly (it just is under control by vaccines)