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Comment by mrintegrity | Hacker News Reader

I was in India ~10 years ago, upon entering the airport i was shocked to see smoke everywhere and assumed there had been some kind of fire. Nope, i was seeing the air, i could see the normal air inside the airport terminal. Pollution is a huge problem in Delhi which surely contributes to bad covid outcomes.

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That was my thought, though the whole nutritional aspect of diet may also play a factor.

I wanted to find a map of Indian pollution averages, pull that up and a map of covid deaths - https://aqicn.org/map/india/ does real-time air-quality and does give some idea.

Also other factors that may or may not play a part would be the climate, we know how well virus's do in winter over summer, equally peoples health. Now India climate wise - the only difference that sticks out this time of year would be that on average the humidity is at it's lowest point of the year, as is rainfall. Are they factors, maybe and equally less rain would also mean more particulates in the air and that we can measure with air quality.

[EDIT ADD] AS for nutritional - let us be mindful that the impact of a whole year upon business and income in India may well of seen peoples nutritional intake decline due to trickle down economics being quick to pass on the bad times over the good, and for many income wise this year not been good and not everybody gets paid to stay at home in every country.

A whole year ago early in the pandemic (may2020), dutch pollster / data entrepreneur Maurice De Hond was purged from google indexes, for suggesting there was a link between covid spikes and weather.

His research [1] indicated that brazil (manaus) and ecuador (guayaquil) - both hit early on by the disease- showed a very strong predictive basis for spikes in covid19 deaths/cases, and massive rainfall.

Now, its important to note that this was not referring to classic "rain". The previously mentioned cities lie on a specific latitude which has torrential rainfall, the kind that floods roads, etc. This was moonson-style rain happens near the equator (it was remarkable early on how south America and africa were mostly spared, except for the aforementioned 2 cities)

Fast forward to india.

Would an early moonson season, together with a latent pool of virus already Within the populace, be the driving factor here?

[1] https://www.maurice.nl/2020/05/21/the-blind-spot-with-huge-c...

I'm curious to know, why he was de-indexed from Google?

Early on in the pandemic, information about covid19 not coming from official channels seemed to disappear from search engines quickly.

That was the claim. I dont have information that would point the motives behind any such action, besides pure speculation (govt request, genuine awkward attempt to help, etc)

The air quality was bad for the first wave (H2 2020) as well though, so it can't be helping, but it can't be what's causing this second wave to be such a catastrophe.

You always can tell you're about to land in Delhi because you can smell the air before you touch down.

That said, I don't think this alone is an explanation, since COVID is currently also tearing through Indian cities like Bangalore where air quality is better. (Not good, mind you, but nowhere near as bad.)

> You always can tell you're about to land in Delhi because you can smell the air before you touch down.

What a great description. It sounds like Terry Pratchett describing Ankh-Morpork.

The air pollution was there even the last year. But, the situation was not this bad. Surely the air pollution is a problem, but there must me more to the current crisis which was not there last year.

It was like that 20 years ago. You can see the pollution.

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