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India a biblical type disaster

My daughter tends to try and block/ignore the really bad things that go on around the world. I was having a chat with her this evening about Covid19 and mentioned the situation in India. I did a quick Google search to try and illustrate and found this article from the beeb, which is a week old and had slipped by me. Pretty horrific, are we looking at the devastation of a nation here, knowing the living conditions and the density of the population in the big cities is it unstoppable. How long before the rest of the world go so far as isolating India and let the devil play his game because for sure their god aint helping.

 
My daughter tends to try and block/ignore the really bad things that go on around the world. I was having a chat with her this evening about Covid19 and mentioned the situation in India. I did a quick Google search to try and illustrate and found this article from the beeb, which is a week old and had slipped by me. Pretty horrific, are we looking at the devastation of a nation here, knowing the living conditions and the density of the population in the big cities is it unstoppable. How long before the rest of the world go so far as isolating India and let the devil play his game because for sure their god aint helping.

At least they have a space programme and 1.4 million troops
 
My daughter tends to try and block/ignore the really bad things that go on around the world. I was having a chat with her this evening about Covid19 and mentioned the situation in India. I did a quick Google search to try and illustrate and found this article from the beeb, which is a week old and had slipped by me. Pretty horrific, are we looking at the devastation of a nation here, knowing the living conditions and the density of the population in the big cities is it unstoppable. How long before the rest of the world go so far as isolating India and let the devil play his game because for sure their god aint helping.


To keep the maths simple I've done a little bit of rounding.

Indian population is 1.4 billion.
Average life expectancy is 70 years.
Therefore 20 million people die every year.
Or 55,000 people die every day from all causes.

200,000 Covid deaths is basically a bit of a blip in a county with 14 endemic diseases, plus cholera and a few other nasties.

 
To keep the maths simple I've done a little bit of rounding.

Indian population is 1.4 billion.
Average life expectancy is 70 years.
Therefore 20 million people die every year.
Or 55,000 people die every day from all causes.

200,000 Covid deaths is basically a bit of a blip in a county with 14 endemic diseases, plus cholera and a few other nasties.

Very early days
 
To be honest I am surprised it took so long to happen. I'm told the place is a toilet, abject poverty, people living on the streets, urchins running around free-range, pollution, shit flowing down streets.

The Mrs was running HR for the credit card division of a large UK bank when they decided to open a third party run call centre in India. A site visit was required. The Mrs having worked with some of the best RSM's and workshop WO's BAOR had to offer knows how to do an inspection. She inspected the call centre building and found that there was one, just the one, asian, hole in the floor bog for the whole building and it was liberally smeared with a layer of shit. She questioned the staff and management, the management/owners were embarrassed at having been caught, and the staff told her they went to the local Mickey D's down the road if they wanted to use any clean facilities.

She refused to go back again, and worked hard at having the place closed down so that no one else had to go back again either.
 
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There's a lot of disaster-porn reporting going on with regard to India, and the media is able to use images of death, grieving relatives, hospital patients etc. that would never be acceptable when reporting on western nations. The incessant obsession with funeral pyres adds a nice apocalyptic touch to the scenes thus providing clickbait for news wires that need to compete for relevancy these days.

It is also very hard to get a picture of whether this outbreak is truly nationwide or in fact largely confined to certain specific regions, I suspect it is the latter but am happy to be proven wrong.

The actual figures of Covid deaths per million are fairly comparable with some of the harder hit parts of the western world in March/April 2020. As has been pointed out India has a huge population, people die in their hundreds of thousands every day, many of ghastly diseases that wouldn't be pretty if photographed or in conditions in hospitals that would horrify westerners but which in normal times pass unremarked.

It may of course get much worse, maybe the numbers of Covid deaths will surge to the millions that are being predicted, but I suspect not. I think it will follow a similar pattern to all the other outbreaks around the world, it will be pretty awful for a few weeks as hopelessly inadequate health and funeral systems break under the pressure and then it will ease.

The media will then move to the next disaster area, Indonesia? Nigeria? to report on in similar apocalyptic measures.
 
There's a lot of disaster-porn reporting going on with regard to India, and the media is able to use images of death, grieving relatives, hospital patients etc. that would never be acceptable when reporting on western nations. The incessant obsession with funeral pyres adds a nice apocalyptic touch to the scenes thus providing clickbait for news wires that need to compete for relevancy these days.

It is also very hard to get a picture of whether this outbreak is truly nationwide or in fact largely confined to certain specific regions, I suspect it is the latter but am happy to be proven wrong.

The actual figures of Covid deaths per million are fairly comparable with some of the harder hit parts of the western world in March/April 2020. As has been pointed out India has a huge population, people die in their hundreds of thousands every day, many of ghastly diseases that wouldn't be pretty if photographed or in conditions in hospitals that would horrify westerners but which in normal times pass unremarked.

It may of course get much worse, maybe the numbers of Covid deaths will surge to the millions that are being predicted, but I suspect not. I think it will follow a similar pattern to all the other outbreaks around the world, it will be pretty awful for a few weeks as hopelessly inadequate health and funeral systems break under the pressure and then it will ease.

The media will then move to the next disaster area, Indonesia? Nigeria? to report on in similar apocalyptic measures.
The actual numbers of infections and deaths in India are estimated to be as much as an order of magnitude (10 times) higher than officially reported. The number found by testing is barely scratching the surface, as so many can't or don't bother getting tested (they already know they're sick). Many deaths go unreported, their families simply bury or cremate them and that's as far as it goes.

The scale of the actual death going on can be imagined if you realise that they can't cremate bodies fast enough in normal cremation places and are burning them wherever they can find a spot. If the actual deaths were not significantly greater than normal then disposing of the bodies wouldn't be such a problem.

At the moment the death rate is particularly high in the area around Mumbai, Delhi, and certain other areas. What is happening in the countryside where the majority of the people live is not well known. People in villages and small towns die of "fever", their bodies get burned, and that's the end of it.

What happened was that a few months ago the Indians were patting themselves on the back over what a great job they had been doing of managing the pandemic, and they got complacent. They allowed big political rallies and religious festivals to go ahead, and these turned into massive "superspreader" events where large number of people travelled there, got infected, and then took it home with them, and spread it to more people there.

The solution is going to have to be traditional public health measures, but the federal government won't impose a national lock down. Local authorities are imposing various restrictions locally, but it's very spotty. They say full on lockdown isn't practical because the country is too poor.

They are trying to ramp up vaccinations, but they have shortages of critical imported items needed to make vaccines.

Things are going to remain dire in India for weeks to come. As to how much worse it gets will depend on how far it spreads to other areas.

You mention what the next disaster area will be, and then suggest Indonesia or Nigeria. Both of those could quite possibly see a crisis. The pandemic is far from over, and as we have seen with India is really just getting going in some parts of the world.
 
There's a lot of disaster-porn reporting going on with regard to India, and the media is able to use images of death, grieving relatives, hospital patients etc. that would never be acceptable when reporting on western nations. The incessant obsession with funeral pyres adds a nice apocalyptic touch to the scenes thus providing clickbait for news wires that need to compete for relevancy these days.

It is also very hard to get a picture of whether this outbreak is truly nationwide or in fact largely confined to certain specific regions, I suspect it is the latter but am happy to be proven wrong.
You just have to read some of the posts from @bedended to show that you are wrong. He lives in India, Shimla I think, up in the foothills of the Himilayas and it has reached his area.
 
They say full on lockdown isn't practical because the country is too poor.
Snipped for brevity. That's probably the most sensible thing I've heard from that country's government. After all, if here in the UK, as one of probably the top 10 economies, people are (quite rightly) moaning about job losses and forthcoming years of penury, how the heck would a nation such as India survive it?
 
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