if you look at the graphs they were going along OK and then *blam*.
Did they get hit by a new variant or something? Was the gov't just lying all along? Did they just get lax? I know they're allowing their various religious activities (e.g. the big pilgrimages) again.
Something drastic changed. If you look at the graphs it looks like somebody changed the exponent. It's nuts.
That certainly didn't help, but the surge started well before that. According the the same article, "The second wave, which began in March and has rapidly accelerated in the past week...". And, the incubation period pushes the start to even earlier. Perhaps Maha Shivaratri?
Looking at a logarithmic graph of confirmed Covid-19 deaths [1], it the death count increases roughly as a straight line. This implies exponential growth as the scale is logarithmic.
Extrapolating to the start of the line I get around March 8th. However, the curve is a 7-day-rolling value, so deaths actually started a few days earlier. And infections are likely 2-3 weeks before death. This gives us sometime around say 15th of February, or a few days later.
Exponential growth means people were mixing all over (essentially infinite-dimensional topology).
Linear growth in total cases means people weren't mixing at all maybe with a few of the same people with some overlap, just a pulse traveling down a wire.
Quadratic growth means people were mixing with their immediate neighbors.
Cubic growth means lots and lots of friends across town.
Rough approximations of course, but a good way to check if it's behavior or something else. If it's suddenly a more contagious versi
If you had like kind data from the start, then yes. But that's not the history of what actually happened.
In the UK for example, the sequencing effort got started right around the time of the autumn surge. They were also starting sequencing en masse and noticed a new variant (b.117). They fit a slope and pulled out the "50 to 70 pct more contagious" stat and then went into lockdown.
An obvious confounding factor is that they were coming out of lockdown before they went into it.
And yet another confounding factor is compliance: unless you demand Papahs! Pleez! and/or black-bag people off the street for being out of the house *consistently* and *uniformly* you have no idea if there are any off the books dinner parties going on.
So again: lots of confounding factors, easy scaremonger narrative...means take it with a grain of salt and focus on what you know to be true, not just on the shiny thing that is technically plausible but recommends itself by its clickbait potential more than its body of evidence.
While you have a good point and the Indian government fucked up big time by declaring victory over the virus and opening up too much. More contagious variants will boost infection rates even with no changes in behavior and variants that make people sicker means that people who previously got infected and barely noticed now end up needing oxygen to survive.
Plausible...but also consistent with stories of the first surge in the Northeast last year: get enough people sick with a big enough viral load from all directions and suddenly you have hospitals at capacity with people prone on ventilators. And lots of people blowing it off as the sniffles or a bad flu.
What you see on tv is lines out the door and people hefting oxygen cylinders on their backs because there's not enough hand trucks to go around.
What you almost certainly don't see is people at home with mild
Locally, while due to pandemic fatigue and the BS that the young don't have to worry, there has been more mixing, it is hard to blame the high rate of hospitalizations on that, or even the high case load especially with over a third, mostly older people, vaccinated. Next door in N. Alberta, I just listened to the mayor swearing that people are still following the health guidance, and in one of the youngest (age of pop.) cities in Canada, the case load, along with hospitizations has exploded, with 1% of the
Not to mention that a relatively "normal" death rate of 2% of the infected (as in Romania, for example) that have access to life support equipment suddenly becomes a lot larger when you no longer have oxygen, assisted respirators, antiviral medicine,... Fortunately, while remdesivir was not always available in Romania, the Emergency Medicine and Life Support crews held their end admirably (with how many personal sacrifices I have no idea).
Yes, that is the real danger, along with running out of qualified personal, which is the danger here in parts of Canada. The ICU nurses in particular have really had it hard.
Recently a doctor from Timisoara's COVID ICU died - probably committed suicide. One too many patients lost, or one too many 24 hours shifts, or one too many cases of not enough medicine, or one too many patients _without_ COVID that have no bed because COVID cases take everything... or most probably all of them again and again and again for close to 15 months. I don't have the slightest idea what's the workload there, but it must be heartbreaking to have younger, healthier and fitter patients dying to COVID.
A penny saved is a penny to squander.
-- Ambrose Bierce
Anyone know what happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did they get hit by a new variant or something? Was the gov't just lying all along? Did they just get lax? I know they're allowing their various religious activities (e.g. the big pilgrimages) again.
Something drastic changed. If you look at the graphs it looks like somebody changed the exponent. It's nuts.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know that anyone knows for sure what happened yet, but a lot of people suspect it was related to Kumbh Mela:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/12/india/india-covid-kumbh-mela-crowd-intl-hnk-scli/index.html [cnn.com]
Re: (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at a logarithmic graph of confirmed Covid-19 deaths [1], it the death count increases roughly as a straight line. This implies exponential growth as the scale is logarithmic.
Extrapolating to the start of the line I get around March 8th. However, the curve is a 7-day-rolling value, so deaths actually started a few days earlier. And infections are likely 2-3 weeks before death. This gives us sometime around say 15th of February, or a few days later.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/exp... [ourworldindata.org]
Re: Anyone know what happened? (Score:5, Informative)
Exponential growth means people were mixing all over (essentially infinite-dimensional topology).
Linear growth in total cases means people weren't mixing at all maybe with a few of the same people with some overlap, just a pulse traveling down a wire.
Quadratic growth means people were mixing with their immediate neighbors.
Cubic growth means lots and lots of friends across town.
Rough approximations of course, but a good way to check if it's behavior or something else. If it's suddenly a more contagious versi
Re: (Score:2)
"More contagious" means they fit a curve and pulled out a bigger slope and attributed it to viral mutation rather than human behavior.
Note: more contagious versions tend to push out the less contagious versions as well. So it's not just curve fitting.
Re: Anyone know what happened? (Score:2)
If you had like kind data from the start, then yes. But that's not the history of what actually happened.
In the UK for example, the sequencing effort got started right around the time of the autumn surge. They were also starting sequencing en masse and noticed a new variant (b.117). They fit a slope and pulled out the "50 to 70 pct more contagious" stat and then went into lockdown.
An obvious confounding factor is that they were coming out of lockdown before they went into it.
And yet another confounding factor is compliance: unless you demand Papahs! Pleez! and/or black-bag people off the street for being out of the house *consistently* and *uniformly* you have no idea if there are any off the books dinner parties going on.
So again: lots of confounding factors, easy scaremonger narrative...means take it with a grain of salt and focus on what you know to be true, not just on the shiny thing that is technically plausible but recommends itself by its clickbait potential more than its body of evidence.
Re: (Score:2)
While you have a good point and the Indian government fucked up big time by declaring victory over the virus and opening up too much. More contagious variants will boost infection rates even with no changes in behavior and variants that make people sicker means that people who previously got infected and barely noticed now end up needing oxygen to survive.
Re: Anyone know what happened? (Score:2)
Plausible...but also consistent with stories of the first surge in the Northeast last year: get enough people sick with a big enough viral load from all directions and suddenly you have hospitals at capacity with people prone on ventilators. And lots of people blowing it off as the sniffles or a bad flu.
What you see on tv is lines out the door and people hefting oxygen cylinders on their backs because there's not enough hand trucks to go around.
What you almost certainly don't see is people at home with mild
Re: (Score:2)
Locally, while due to pandemic fatigue and the BS that the young don't have to worry, there has been more mixing, it is hard to blame the high rate of hospitalizations on that, or even the high case load especially with over a third, mostly older people, vaccinated. Next door in N. Alberta, I just listened to the mayor swearing that people are still following the health guidance, and in one of the youngest (age of pop.) cities in Canada, the case load, along with hospitizations has exploded, with 1% of the
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention that a relatively "normal" death rate of 2% of the infected (as in Romania, for example) that have access to life support equipment suddenly becomes a lot larger when you no longer have oxygen, assisted respirators, antiviral medicine, ... Fortunately, while remdesivir was not always available in Romania, the Emergency Medicine and Life Support crews held their end admirably (with how many personal sacrifices I have no idea).
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, that is the real danger, along with running out of qualified personal, which is the danger here in parts of Canada. The ICU nurses in particular have really had it hard.
Re: (Score:2)
Recently a doctor from Timisoara's COVID ICU died - probably committed suicide.
One too many patients lost, or one too many 24 hours shifts, or one too many cases of not enough medicine, or one too many patients _without_ COVID that have no bed because COVID cases take everything... or most probably all of them again and again and again for close to 15 months. I don't have the slightest idea what's the workload there, but it must be heartbreaking to have younger, healthier and fitter patients dying to COVID.