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Comment by free_glamorgan | Hacker News Reader

I have a working hypothesis that a very large number of people don't personally know anyone who has died of Covid, except maybe for an elderly relative and "they were getting on a bit anyway". It's true of me and anyone else I've had this conversation with.

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Do you live in a first world Western country and is your social circle comprised of people who do the same? In my experience when you go outside of that circle you start finding people who have personally experienced loss from COVID very quickly.

Statistically, a social circle comprised of first world, Western, overweight and inactive and generally older folk should have the most susceptibility to death from Covid.

I found completely the opposite. I spoke with all my Indian colleagues. Covid? What's that they said. No problem here Sir..

Covid seems to be, physically and emotionally, a primarily Western disease. And as bad as the fallout has been where I live, it seems to have been particularly damaging in the US (on both of those counts).

Seriously, the Indian variant (I forget which letter they gave it) was pretty devastating over there. I have many colleagues and they all know people who died, if not in their own family.

The official statistics on Covid deaths in India showed a mortality rate 1/10th that of the US. There would need to be more than an order of magnitude error in reporting for their death rate to exceed that of the US.

FWIW, calling it the "Indian variant" is apparently not ok. Do you mean Delta?

That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60981318

> More than 4.7 million people in India - nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest - are thought to have died because of Covid-19, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report.

> Three large peer-reviewed studies had found that India's deaths from the pandemic by September 2021 were "six to seven times higher than reported officially". A paper in The Lancet by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research centre, uses subnational all-cause mortality data from 12 Indian states. They come close to the WHO's estimation.

I'm aware of that, which is why I made the point that it would only bring India's Covid death rate to around the same as the US and other Western countries. It is also of no help to the discussion around my original point, which is the idea that a very large number of people don't personally know anyone who died unexpectedly of Covid.

India was very badly affected in the cities, much more so than western Europe. That their overall rate is low is also because of the huge rural areas.

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