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Comment by i_have_to_speak | Hacker News Reader

Ah yet another cant-be-true-they're-hiding-something article? Surely they can't be doing better than developed countries?

FWIW, India did implement a stronger lockdown much earlier on in the curve than other countries. State and federal authorities went lock-step in their actions, and with consistent messaging. Police enforced the lockdown at times even brutally, getting the point across to the general public. Indians watched UK and US struggle through a denial and late response in disbelief, like watching a car crash in slow motion.

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This is something that has really struck me during the Corona crisis: the misplaced Western believe of superiority towards Asian countries. I am European and I feel embarrassed about how much arrogance is displayed by some people and governments.

It started already in the beginning, when the virus was spreading rapidly in China. Reports about the failing Chinese authority were all over the place, but nobody seemed to worry that when the virus would eventually reach Europe, we would be in trouble as well. After all how could we, with our superior health system and our governments that would react quickly and rationally on such a trivial threat as this.

When the virus had reached Europe, it had already reached South Korea and Taiwan as well. These countries had learned from the earlier SARS outbreak how to deal with it and thoroughly tested everyone that could possibly have the virus, symptoms or not. The reaction I saw in the media was mostly about the breach in privacy that these measures brought. Surely this was not something that we, as enlightened Western societies, would want. And anyway, what were we frightened of. This virus could never spread so fast in Europe as it did in China, because .. Well because of what actually.

Now that the pandemic has wrecked havoc in the entire Western world and most people are realising that a strategy of first constraining the virus (like in Wuhan) and then testing everybody to contain in (like in South Korea) is the only realistic way to deal with it, one might think that a bit of humbleness towards Asia would be in place. Think again. What we're seeing more and more instead is denial. Investigations are started if the Covid virus was manifactured in a laboratory in Wuhan for instance.

There was some interesting article about possibility that this virus is artificial. Author came to conclusion that it's possible, but there's no way to prove that (other than insider leaking strong proofs, of course). Modern virusology laboratory can create such a virus indeed and it'll be indistinguishable from a wild virus.

Unfortunately this article is in Russian, I'll provide google translate link, but it probably will be translated with errors.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3...

I've not seen this - which country are you in? I've seen acknowledgement of South Korea's success, and criticism of China's failings.

How about acknowledgement of success in Vietnam, Eastern Europe, India, China, etc?

GP is right, that you hardly hear it in the news.

China’s first response to doctors reporting the virus was to send police to them and shut them up. I’ll gladly believe I live in a better country.

I had the impression, based on news articles at the time, that local officials were behind the initial coverup in Wuhan, lasting until national officials rectified the situation.

I'm not sure local officials would be behind all the censorship and police abuse that's happened like this:

> Three Chinese citizen journalists have also gone missing after they uploaded videos showing a critical view of the situation in Wuhan to YouTube and Twitter.

https://qz.com/1816219/chinese-internet-rallied-to-save-a-ce...

> Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project.

https://qz.com/1846277/china-arrests-users-behind-github-cor...

Both of the articles you linked to mention local police, in Wuhan and Beijing.

This is a common political trope in China used to shift responsibility away from the center and should not be taken at face value.

> I had the impression, based on news articles at the time, that local officials were behind the initial coverup in Wuhan, lasting until national officials rectified the situation.

CPP propaganda strategically concentrates blame for any kind of domestic problem on local officials in order make the central authorities seem trustworthy and competent by comparison. While the local Wuhan officials definitely had an independent hand in the mismanagement, the central government had its role, too.

It's also arguable that the central government is responsible for the coverup activities by the Wuhan officials, because they're the ones who've created and sustained the system those local officials operate in.

>It's also arguable that the central government is responsible for the coverup activities by the Wuhan officials, because they're the ones who've created and sustained the system those local officials operate in.

I like this line of thinking, I think it better reflects reality then the often heard knee-jerk reaction assuming that China is an evil monolith.

I wonder sometimes why I bristle at the comments painting China as an evil monolith. They probably do the same to us. Both systems have their own ways of enriching and defending those in power.

Perhaps it is because I don't like to blame others for our problems? The US bungled tests, was late to quarantine, the feds were contradicting states, states were contradicting cities, hospitals muzzled health care workers, etc. None of that really has anything to do with China. It comes across to me as propaganda to blame them for all that!

The US can make mistakes and guess what - the political oppression and police abuse in China is still nothing short of evil.

Right, we can't have it both ways:

Either Asian countries are lying because they are extremely advanced in their population centers and also authoritarian, which would be the only way for it to be news.

Asian countries are lying because they have the exact same organizational dysfunction as every country in 'the west', and also authoritarian, in which case it isn't news.

so which is it folks, superior technology cohesive culture and leadership, or organizational dysfunction no different from the west.

I agree with you and I’ve made the same observation but I don’t think it’s due to some misplaced sense of superiority.

I think it’s simply because it has been a while since disease and pestilence was a worry for the average Western country so the average citizen (and therefore the leaders) are complacent in a sort of “It can’t happen here” way. There have been outbreaks such as the AIDS epidemic or swine flu but nothing as impactful, infectious, and at the scale of COVID.

Whereas Asian countries have grappled with issues of SARS, Malaria, AIDS, Polio, and many more in the not so distant past and have learned the importance of taking public health seriously. The experience of the outcome of mismanaging a response to a previous epidemic is still “fresh” so to say in many of these countries. I think a good example of this is how South Korea dealt with SARS and evolved their response to COVID based on the learnings from that.

Lastly I wonder if the prevalence of more communal societies in Asian cultures make a difference. I can imagine it could make the problem worse but it could also be beneficial in the sense of providing strong societal pressures to quarantine/hand wash/social distance/etc.

Edit: And of course the misguided leaders in particular Western countries are not helping. Maybe the US this particular time is just a statistical outlier due to some mismanagement and there is nothing more to read into further than that?

> I think it’s simply because it has been a while since disease and pestilence was a worry for the average Western country so the average citizen (and therefore the leaders) are complacent in a sort of “It can’t happen here” way. There have been outbreaks such as the AIDS epidemic or swine flu but nothing as impactful, infectious, and at the scale of COVID.

I agree that this is the main factor. Consequently I proposed the concept of the "civilization immune system" to explain how it works: https://www.sonyasupposedly.com/civilizational-immune-system...

I flew from India to the US in early February (2nd week).

Indian airports were doing thermal checks on passengers (using tech that had been installed during the Zika virus scare a few years back, I believe). The newspapers also had info about how anyone found with elevated temperatures were being asked to self quarantine, and the police was also following up.

The US had, absolutely nothing. Nada. Before the flight I was afraid that entering the US would be difficult, but it was clear (and it remained this way for over a month), that if anything, entering India, if not difficult, would actually involve checks, something that was non existent in US ports.

Further, and I don’t know if this is mentioned, the flight into India involved the cabin crew spraying some sort of pest control spray in the cabins before we landed. They mentioned it was due to regulations. Considering SARS-COV-2 has been found to have been easily killed (within minutes) of exposure to common disinfectants, could this spray have greatly minimized the virus entering the country, on baggage’s and clothing, etc?

To be fair with the disinfectant that's been the case with India for years - I went in 2016 and they were doing it then as well.

They started doing it after SARS-COV-1 back in 2002. The rest of the world actually respects intelligence and science (so far) but unfortunately in India it looks like the Fox-News/AM-Radio playbook is starting to win.

Yep, since 2014 at least. I always assumed it was some kind of insecticide/pesticide? Is it just a disinfectant?

It's an insecticide. It's common on routes to/from a number of countries.

It's a disinsection (i.e. insect-killing) procedure; the pesticides permitted by the WHO are synthetic pyrethroids like permethrin.

ref. https://www.cdc.gov/features/pesticides-aircraft/index.html

Pyrethoids are really used everywhere for everything

That is why bed bugs have become resistant to it

Insecticide. It's mainly to kill mosquitos. IIRC they introduced it when Zika and Chikungunya were spreading.

Similar situation here. I travelled from Bangalore to the UK, around the first week of March, almost everyone at Bangalore airport had masks, workers had masks and gloves.

When I landed at Heathrow, not even immigration folks had masks

People in India took it seriously in the beginning

I flew into the US end of last week, more than a month since shelter in place started in many states. Still no checks of any sort. There were a couple of questions by the airline during check in but nothing after that. No questions at customs, no temperature checks.

I don't think that's disinfectant they were spraying, but rather insecticide for biosecurity. They do it on the way into Australia and New Zealand too prevent the spread of agricultural pests.

The entire gist of the article isn't "it can't be true they're hiding something", it's "if statistics in the West are underreported which they likely are, why on earth would one believe they're not underreported in a country with far more limited access to medical care for much of the population where deaths from respiratory diseases are far more commonplace in normal times"

India's lockdown started the day after the UK, and whilst undoubtedly the government has taken some strong measures to make the lockdown viable, it also faced unique challenges like significant parts of the urban poor population attempting to return home to families in their villages. Of course, despite being later than Western lockdowns chronologically, India's lockdown was earlier with respect to the known spread of the disease, but that in itself is a phenomena worthy of explanation.

When New York went in to lockdown, it had ~7000 cases (20th March) [1]

When UK went in to lockdown, it had 6700 cases. (23rd March) [2]

When India went in to lockdown, it had 657 cases. (25th March) [2]

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/20/politics/new-york-workfor... [2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Comparing cases is pretty meaningless if you don't also compare test rates.

There is no good metric for comparing test rates as well, tests per million makes no sense when a lot of states within the country have almost zero cases. India's less than 5% positive ratio on tests even in hotspot regions do not indicate a massive lack of testing.

This extremely simple point is missed by almost everyone, to the point where I think it's malicious (hey US media).

> Comparing cases is pretty meaningless if you don't also compare test rates.

True. I'd argue that there are other factors such as demographics, time elapsed since first cases, etc. But I guess it's hard not to. Specially for media needing to fill column inches or otherwise capture our attention :-) It should be possible to simply look at numbers and draw any conclusions but it seems to be very difficult for human beings to do that. We feel the need create a narrative around and find an explanation for our observations.

These are confirmed cases, i.e. people who have tested positive. Actual cases, either in India or the UK, are unknown.

Even if India’s number is off by 2 orders of magnitude so the number of cases were actually ~70000 (highly unlikely, since those numbers would show up in hospitalizations), that would 70,000/1.4Bn, so about 1 in 20,000.

NYC at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 1000, and the UK at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 10,000.

So even if we assume that the US and UK were not undercounting, and that India was undercounting by a factor of 100 (!), India was about half as infected as the UK and an order of magnitude less infected than NYC when it entered lockdown.

India is a pretty big country and just assuming an equal distribution of cases doesn't seem very useful.

The difference between a confirmed case and all cases is that in a confirmed case is a case which has had a viral confirmation. But all cases still involves only those people who have presented for medical attention, because a case is effectively a file about a person. What is unknown is infections.

To top it, some states announced a lockdown a couple days before the country wide annoucnement. TN went into lockdown on 23rd Mar for ex. Overall, I think the local govt of some states (esply Kerala) did well by their people. However, we aren't out of risk by any measure. There are some interesting developments in the region as well. A friend in SG mentioned the 6000 odd cases of migrant workers who tested +ve in Singapore, but during the same period ICU occupancy reduced there, with only one case reaching critical condition .. and recovering. Most migrant workers in SG are from the Indian subcontinent and are generally young and healthy.

It sure feels like there are something not well understood about this virus from infection/death stats alone.

CPI(M) continues to tak ZERO Ls. Lal Salam!

Also, there are a few factors that are in favor of India. The number of international travelers between China and India is much lesser compared to European countries. I suspect this may have played a huge role in reducing the initial exposure.

Added to that, apart from major cities, international travelers are minuscule in the general population. Consequently, the largest group of exposed citizens are from Mumbai & Delhi. Other cities are relatively less exposed.

I agree with you. The condescending tone by Western media towards India is awful and disgusting.

The reality is probably that it's a combination of doing the lockdown well and the disease being far less deadly than initially thought due to very high asymptomatic infection rates. The latter is an emerging fact that the media here are in denial over. Therefore, they think India must be undercounting or something else. Awful and insulting.

BTW, in regards to US, the lockdowns here worked. NYC was the only place in the entire country that ended up getting hit bad. The rest of the nation has not been hit anywhere approaching what was predicted by models which took into account lockdowns. Outside of NYC, US statistics match Germany.

NYC certainly got hit bad, but I wouldn't say it's the only badly hit city. Here is deaths/total pop for some other cities >1mil population which I would also call "hit hard".

NYC: 1.07‰

New Orleans: 0.65‰

Detroit: 0.60‰

Boston: 0.44‰

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/corona...

I think you're off by a factor of 10 in your numbers

I'm using the per-mille (‰) rather than per-cent (%) symbol. Sorry for the confusion, but it's a more convenient unit for these quantities. This is how it'd look in percentages:

NYC: 0.107%

New Orleans: 0.065%

Detroit: 0.060%

Boston: 0.044%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mille

Ahh, today i learned

I've never seen that notation in my entire life. Learn something new every day.

Just want to point out that you didn't call that out explicitly. 99% (note that it's a percent) of people who saw your comment would see it and view it as a percent. I did, and I work with data all day every day.

It's unintentionally misleading to use notation like that without calling it out.

Just type "per mille" next time.

You're right, I should have called it out in the text. I thought ‰ was okay because I was comparing the other cities to NYC, not to an absolute value. Also, I think it's a fun symbol, and I want more english speakers to use it.

I live in Kazakhstan and so far out country seems to be doing a right thing. We're heavily quarantined and I don't think that states are hiding anything. Economy implications of such a lockdown probably will be harsh, but that's a different thing. There was ill person in the building I'm living in and now entire building section just closed, nobody can go out and regular desinfections are performed (I don't think that they make any sense, but whatever).

So I'm absolutely sure that Kazakhstan is doing better than many European countries and for sure better than US. May be our government is not the most democratic one out there, but they care about citizens and their tight grip over country allows them to make an unpopular but effective decisions.

Some western people just think that they are strictly superior everywhere to the developing countries. That might be true in a lot of areas, but it's not an universal truth.

> Some western people just think that they are strictly superior everywhere to the developing countries.

The so-called western people, I'd argue, have the right mindset. I agree governments capable of draconian measures tend to do well when such behaviour control is desirable at a nationwide scale. That doesn't mean it is the only solution or even the best one.

I personally would pretty much prefer prevention, absent which, a measured, well thought-out, least disruptive policy around epidemics (I am looking at you South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam). Curtailing liberties, harsher restrictions, oppressive policing, regressive policies don't really fill me up with any sort of confidence. In fact, I worry that the citizens that are not just in acceptance of such a response, but in appraisal of it, are in for a grim reality-check when another unrest, epidemic or otherwise, rears its ugly head.

South Korean government did have strong laws on their side, some of which can be considered as draconian by American standards[1].

Considering behaviour of American population to the lax government measures, I guess strong laws/measures are the way to go.

1. https://www.lawfareblog.com/lessons-america-how-south-korean...

Came here to say this. When compared to the Western world, India did fare well and its not a mystery. Though the lock-downs were brutal for many Indians, they were strictly implemented and most people had the sense to follow the procedures. No denying that economic repercussions will be brutal as well but not many lives were lost. In my hometown, there isn't a single active case of COVID19 and its essentially a "green zone" now with most things returning back to normal. Local Police did a phenomenal job contact tracing and enforcing the lock-down. I wonder if life in USA would have gone back to normal by now if there was a better response and acceptance of the impending crisis. I am glad they don't have Fox news in India.

The Police, despite their shortcomings and inspite of their over-zealousness, must be commended. They really did show up for their country at the time of utmost need.

It's not really about judging or comparing unfairly, it's more about india's population density in the case of a contagious disease.

It seems countries are learning something from the those affected earlier which is good. But there are a huge number of under counts to be seen in the all-cause mortality data.

I have my fingers crossed for everyone going through this, but only after the fact are we going to get a good idea of what happened (and that goes for Western countries too).

"U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...

exactly.

The TL;DR is in the final sentence: "we don't know".

So many keystrokes and clicked bait on something nobody has any concrete insight into.

India started lockdown when confirmed Covid deaths was at about 200 or 300 total. Its now at ~900 and doubling every ~10 days.

You got the facts completely wrong, India started the lockdown when total deaths were just 10 !

Source: https://www.covid19india.org/

Right. My bad. I was looking at the lockdown extension date sorry.

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