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Comment by mesaframe | Hacker News Reader

>India has been contact tracing like a greedy algorithm on steroids since case #1.

Care to provide source?

>People are self policing mainly to avoid police, but they are self policing each other because nobody wants their buildings sealed.

I have seen videos of people violating lockdown without fear.

>There are only 85 active infections

85 infections which were caught.

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> Care to provide source?

There is some info here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/asia/india-coronavi...

The US is #1 in infections for a reason: we are doing it wrong.

>The US is #1 in infections for a reason: we are doing it wrong.

It's more likely that we're testing far more than most countries than "we're doing it wrong."

> testing far more than most countries

source?

Have you looked at deaths? Or are you suggesting india's creating mass graves that media is not aware of, or doctors who aren't speaking out.

I have a lot of relatives back in India who are doctors, and our hospitals aren't overwhelmed. There are very few cases. And they test every ICU admit for coronavirus.

india doesnt have mass graves not because 'they are doing it right' or they are 'hiding the bodies', but because ITS WARM AND HUMID AND YOUNG. people are acting like idiots when it comes to this virus.

take this article: "...others talk about the possibilities of the presence of a less virulent strain of the virus in India, along with the possibility that its hot weather was diminishing the contagion. Both these claims are not backed by any evidence."

they have such a hard-lined stance, which is odd because: ""To be totally frank, I don't know and the world doesn't know the answer,""

there IS evidence warm weather makes a difference. droplet virus last longer in the air colder / dryer climates, its why we have a flu season. This has been tested. you pair that with outcomes of countries based on climate, you see a trend that matches expectation.

so "Both these claims are not backed by any evidence.", literally the opposite is true. you could argue that maybe cv19 is different than other cv, but so far that isn't true. Not to mention India is younger than most nations on the planet, you have a recipe for a low risk nation.

And for a nation that initiated its lock down 5 days after New York City and to be attributing all their low effects from the virus from their actions? thats laughable. If anything, India is probably doing worse to itself

You are comparing totally non sense timelines. Five days after NYC, but so many cases before NYC.

if you think its nonsense get your logic circuits checked. India is closer geographically speaking. Their lock-down was extremely late in the game. The 5 days after NYC puts in context just how far late it was; I'm sorry you do not have the ability to see the importance of that.

> if you think its nonsense get your logic circuits checked.

If you need to attack people to get your point across, it means your argument holds no weight.

You don't do lockdowns based on how some far away city is doing. Germany did lockdown months after Wuhan, yet they are doing fine.

> India is closer geographically speaking.

What does that even mean? Closer together? Closer together than jam packed NYC? Closer to jam packed NYC? Both of these are incorrect.

> Their lock-down was extremely late in the game.

Extremely late by what measure? Number of cases in country? Extremely late compared to which country?

> The 5 days after NYC puts in context just how far late it was; So comparing to random cities puts things in context? How many days after Wuhan/Lombardy Germany went in lockdown? How does this comparison makes any sense?

> I'm sorry you do not have the ability to see the importance of that.

I am sorry you can't reason politely.

No. Per capita, our testing is absolute crap--South Korea and Singapore are good examples of countries that actually have done thorough jobs in testing everybody.

South Korea's positive test rates are somewhere in the single digits, the US is around 20-30%. That's not a sign we're "testing far more than most countries."

In fact the governor of Washington said in a speech that we are limited in the amount of testing that we could do, and that we need to be substantially increasing our test capacity and turn-around in order to lift lockdown. So it's very accurate to say the US isn't testing enough.

And in fact the limiting factors for test capacity is our ability to manufacture PPE, swabs, containers, and chemicals. All the things we've been busily outsourcing overseas to China.

The US has actually been testing more people per capita than South Korea (or, indeed, most countries) for a while now - if I remember rightly, for about a month in terms of testing rate and a week or so in terms of total tests done. South Korea is running at about 6,000 tests per day right now with a peak capacity of about 20,000 last used a month or two ago. If scaled up to the US population that would correspond to about 40,000-125,000 tests per day. The US was stuck around 130,000 tests per day for a while but has been at around 200,000 per day for the last few days.

The US media has just carefully worked to convince people of the opposite without technically saying as much, probably for stupid partisan political reasons. South Korea's positive test rate is low because they have few detected cases, and it's not actually clear why - social distancing definitely played a major part, since they had to impose stricter social distancing rules to actually get the number of confirmed cases to drop to the point they are now, but they've dropped those now and even outright lockdowns haven't had the same level of effect elsewhere.

That's become true recently (we're now neck and neck with South Korea), as Korea's case rate has plummeted; South Korea has essentially weathered this storm, or at least the first wave of it. But it's nowhere close to true compared to Italy; our per-capita test rate is half that of Italy's. And Italy's test positive rate is something like half that of ours; the point 'jcranmer makes --- that you can work out whether we're undertesting from our test positive rate --- stands.

What is that based on?

As a relatively rich country, the US has a natural advantage compared to poorer countries, but compared to other countries that have a similar per-capita GDP, that doesn't seem like an obvious conclusion. Hell, given how badly the creation of the original assays by the CDC went, and how distributed the healthcare system is, on top of the current political climate, the opposite conclusion seems warranted.

>India has been contact tracing like a greedy algorithm on steroids since case #1.

Some states like Kerala is doing active contact tracing. Also the first case was reported 3 months ago and not 2 months ago.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/21/kerala...

> >There are only 85 active infections

I am not sure which area the original author is talking about but less than 150 is the real active cases in some states https://dashboard.kerala.gov.in/

all my relatives in india, incl 60+ yr old folks are using contact tracing apps. In the US people are completely ignorant about these things and there's no effort from the govt to push these apps.

So what if you have seen videos where people violate the lockdown?

What are you trying to say? That there is no lockdown, or that a few people violate it or that its no use to lockdown?

Violations of lockdown are happening all over the world. If you are from the USA, better worry about the 60k+counting, avoidable deaths due to avoiding a lockdown.

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