Boris Johnson cancels India trip amid rising cases | Hacker News Reader

Boris Johnson cancels India trip amid rising cases

bbc.com

40 pointsjangid58 comments

It's surprising how much worse the covid situation has recently got in India. If you look at the cases graph https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/

I'm not sure how it's gone from declining in Jan to super exponential in Mar/April?

2 major festivals, Holi and Kumbh Mela (attended by over 2m people with no social distancing or anything), massive election rallies in multiple states. Poor vaccination drive. A double mutant variant of the virus that seems to be faster spreading. Medical system collapsing, almost everything that could go wrong is going wrong.

I live in India. Just got my first dose (Covishield -- which is the AstraZeneca derived vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute). The process was really smooth. Just went to the website, (I could have used the AarogySetup COVID app, but preferred not install it,) was given an appointment date. Turned up on the appointment date, stood in line (a longish line -- a 3 hour wait) and got my vaccine. Was made to wait for 30 mins post vaccination to check for anaphylactic shock then then sent home with a couple of fever pills (paracetamol I think). Was contacted two days later by a robocaller to get my feedback and the vaccine certificate was available for download immediately. The process was REALLY smooth. The thing is, its easy to sit in a tiny country like the UK and say the vaccination program is going well, India is vaccinating at rates similar to the rest of the world 3-4 million per day. But India is so huge that, at that rate it will take several years to vaccinate everybody. Harsh lockdowns sadly are even worse for poor people. They literally caused more deaths in the early days due to starvation (from not having the money to buy food) than the virus itself. It is complex to manage a vast and complex country like India. So glib, short comments on social media sites make good reading but are not reflective of the actual effectiveness of the government in power. And I say this as an ardent critic of the current Modi administration.

3 hours is just long-ish? I'd classify that as a very long wait.

Compared to what? That’s shorter than many voting lines in last US election. Shorter than waiting for an unscheduled bus in many countries. I agree it’s longer than I’d like but it’s all perspective.

Compared to everything? I don't think I've waited anywhere for more than an hour in my life. Maybe a ride in an amusement park or in traffic, but that would be it. Certainly not to vote or get a shot.

This is India we're talking about.

Under 45 people are not even eligible to get vaccinated unless you are a health care worker or well connected. The second wave is being largely driven by people in the 25-45 age group. Less than a percent of India's population is vaccinated against Covid-19.

- Why single out Holi and Kumbh, where there are large gatherings like political Farmers' protests, Ramadan and other religious gatherings are still going on, while the Kumbh (where entry into the district was with RT-PCR negative certificates) & has been called off at the Prime Minister's request.

- The majority of cases come from Maharshtra: 670388, UP:191457, Karnataka:133543, Chattisgargh:128019, Kerala:93683,Delhi:74941 (for a single city state these numbers are high) - which are non-election states. [Source]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103458/india- novel-coronavirus-covid-19-cases-by-state/

- Poor vaccination drive: Nothing can be father from the truth. India is one of the countries which has superb last mile vaccine delivery capability and connectivity till remote villages. Currently vaccination for 45+ age group is being rolled out successfully (with Covishield and Covaxin both). If anything there was lot of anti-vaxx created by media and politically vested interests which resulted in vaccine hesitancy. Now, the same voices are crying hoarse why we cannot vaccinate 1.3 billion people in a single month?

> Poor vaccination drive: Nothing can be father from the truth. India is one of the countries which has superb last mile vaccine delivery ...

It is true that India has done a fantastic job at producing and distributing vaccines. The problem is that the Indian population is absolutely vast, so the fraction of the population that has been successfully inoculated so far is disappointingly small. There is hope that continued robust progress with vaccination could turn the situation around but that is likely to take several more months.

So after Facebook, Twitter and Indian media, Modi propaganda bots have started bombarding HN as well !

For those of us not close to this topic, how do you assess the veracity of OP’s statements?

Recently created handle just to defend Modi government narrative, Using other religions (read Muslim) as scapegoat in defense. Just look at the pictures of large number of people being gathered in kumbh mela and Modi/BJP rallies and tell us in straight face that these are not super spreader events.

India is a huge and complex country. The virus was not waiting for Kumbh to spread for sure, as daily life in most Indian cities operates in super spreader mode.

From a newspaper report on Mumbai Locals [1]-

"Passengers on suburban local trains in Mumbai have increased since the services were resumed for the general public on February 1. Nearly 3.7 million passengers commute everyday by the local train network on the Central and the Western Railway."

[1] https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/mumbai-loc...

PS using a throwaway account ( as all Modi apologists do :-) )

Kerala just had a major election [1] .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Kerala_Legislative_Assemb...

Kumbh mela is going to be probably the single largest super spreader event in the entire world. About 10-12% of people returning from there are testing positive.

We cannot generalize here. Holi is mostly a north-Indian festival. Kumbh is for all; so there we can say that it affects everyone. But this year very few people traveled.

Also when we say "Medical systems collapsing" then we should be specific. Because there are 700+ districts and there is a different story everywhere.

My father and mother went to the community clinic at a walking distance from my house and there was no queue at all. No wait. Now on 1st of May, it is my and my wife's turn.

I don't think it's surprising to anyone that a country with a massive population, poor infrastructure, and greatly divided haves and have nots, are having a bad time. I'd be amazed if this is even 25% of the actual cases reported.

The change from January to March is what's surprising.

25% seems to low even. I've been to India a few times and the vast majority of people don't use the public health system (it's very bad) and prefer to die at home. I wouldn't be surprised if deaths were much higher and corrupt officials in private hospitals were downplaying the amount of cases.

could be the new variants? Or changes in the weather/humidity, what is usually happening during these months in india?

Beginning of the summer months.

One word: variant. Variant B1617 has emerged and India and seems like it could be driving a surge.

There's not a lot of data yet on that variant's transmissibility and lethality but it has already been detected in the UK.

Thus far it doesn't seem to be as dangerous as the Brazilian P1 variant, but could be trouble just the same.

Although the variant is in the U.K it's not yet believed to have come from overseas travel. So maybe this is a variant that has a higher likelihood of mutation in a specific demographic (e.g. Indian).

Speculation at this point to be honest.

Huh? There are flights arriving daily from India, India was where the strain was first detected months ago, and in some parts of India it is the predominant strain. Neither of the two mutations that strain has acquired match the mutation that the B117 (which now dominates the UK and in process of dominating US) strain has.

Multiple trails of evidence pointing to it's emergence in India, and right now the UK is not restricting travel from India so the most likely scenario is that it arrived in the UK from someone who traveled to India or another country where that strain is spreading.

They will restrict from Friday https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56806103

> So maybe this is a variant that has a higher likelihood of mutation in a specific demographic (e.g. Indian).

Is this a thing that's known to have occurred in other viruses? It seems rather unlikely compared to the chance that it came from someone asymptomatic or someone who skipped over the border controls via boat or something like that.

I'd be careful speculating over demographics. There's been a wave of violence against Asian (largely Chinese, Japanese and Korean) people in the US, believed to be caused at least in part by our former president accusing China of accidentally releasing the virus. I wouldn't want some populist to latch on to this theory and start blaming Indian people for variants.

There are almost certainly multiple factors involved. One thing to keep in mind is that the seasonal nature of coronavirus near the equator is very different from farther north with a double hump at the start and end of summer being the usual. It is possible that whatever people are doing and whatever mutations have occurred that some natural factor that we do not understand is contributing.

Can't the chairs of state start acting like CEOs of their countries rather than like royals who need to fly 200 people just to have a chat? They can talk on zoom, all we need to know is "chairman of india spoke to chairman of uk and the following things changed:"

What makes you think they don‘t? Actual physical visits are to eg finalze deals, when high-bandwidth communication is necessary. And by high-bandwidth I mean body language, spontaneous n-to-n conversations between all participants, etc.

i don't think decisions that affect millions should be based on body language

What should they be based on? Its kind of stupid to ask people to behave like Spock like value maximizing machines.

While I see your point, I find commuting umpteen hours for a 5 minute conversation that could have been over the phone, over email, or over zoom-skype-jitsi rather soul-sucking.

And Spock did have emotions.

> like value maximizing machines.

thats the job of a head of state

More like the Tal Shiar, if we’re using Trek references — politicians don’t try to deny emotions.

they should, it's just a job, not their personal drama

Everyone’s personal drama is their job, to some extent or another. You don’t get to run a country unless you can get people emotionally invested in you doing so, because if the electorate — be it the whole nation in a democracy or the aristocrats in a monarchy — is not into you, they’ll pick someone else instead of you.

the issue with democracy is that, because it relies on popularity, it selects for self-absorbed sociopaths. Being one is essential for getting elected but a nightmare after election

You may find this worth your time: https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

we dont call heads of government rulers anymore, and being ruled is not something we aspire to

Given the man’s well documented history of pathological dishonesty [0], I suspect that body language is how he was elected.

[0] e.g. https://youtu.be/ZVOV3sU8Ays

It’s somewhat crazy that I can’t tell without clicking whether this is about Modi or Johnson.

Interesting. FWIW, Modi doesn’t have that kind of reputation in the sections of the UK news that I follow.

Yes I assumed you meant Modi as well. Regardless of how I feel about both of them. It could happen any time two “populist” leaders are brought up that way.

Especially considering international travel is still banned by law for any non-essential purposes, and I can't see how a meeting that could be trivially done on Zoom would be classified as essential.

In person conversations are to preserve plausible deniability, presuming they are not being recorded. I am only going to say things I want a transcript of over electronic mediums. CEOs do the same thing, and it is partly why being located in certain dense cities is so valuable.

When Theresa May visited India in 2016 the conclusion was that Britain was becoming even less relevant to India given that Brexit meant the UK no longer gave India access to EU markets, and because May refused to increase the amount of Indian student visas.* So I'm struggling to see why Johnson would fair any better.

* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37950198

Really sad what's going on over there.

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