COVID Is Barely Killing Anyone in India. Just 0.2% of Confirmed Cases Perished, More Survivable Than the Common Flu
Inhumane lockdown failed and was never warranted
Editor’s note: After starving out who knows how many people with lockdowns India was forced to scrap them and the outcome was…anything but Judgement Day. Having proven that lockdowns were unsustainable India then went on to prove that they were put up in response to what amounts to less than a flu. With 2.7 million detected infections and just 53,000 deaths that makes for a lowly, flu-like CFR (case fatality rate) of 0.2%. But of course, the true number of infections is at least several times higher and the infection correspondingly less lethal. In a young population, this is a pathogen less deadly than the flu by almost an order of magnitude.
New York spends more money per capita on healthcare than any other state in the Union. It ranks third in the country in physicians per 100,000 population at 375.1. In terms of raw infrastructure and medical resources, New York should have been one of the best places in the world to receive treatment for COVID-19.
Yet analysis of New York’s COVID-19 statistics reveal it to be one of the most deadly places in the world for a COVID-19 patient. Consider that the tiny country of San Marino reports the worst “deaths per 1 million population” for COVID-19 at 1,238 per million. Belgium, which is the second worst, reports 852. New York is a disaster compared to even those grim numbers. New York is second in the nation at 1,688 deaths per million. If it were a country, it would lead the world.
The numbers don’t lie. New York should be the poster child of what not to do. Because whatever it’s doing to respond to COVID-19, it’s not saving lives.
Dr. Anthony Fauci somehow learned the opposite lesson from these morbid statistics. He said, “Many parts of the United States didn’t do enough to combat the coronavirus—but New York state did . . . New York got hit worse than any place in the world. And they did it correctly by doing things [that are recommended to fight the disease].” One of those recommendations was to ban or severely restrict the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. This ban came quickly in response to President Trump endorsing the drug.
India, many warned, would become a humanitarian disaster. With a population density of over 75,000 people per square mile in Mumbai, for example, it triples the density of Manhattan, New York. India has only 0.9 doctors per 100,000 population. It spends only $69.29 per capita on healthcare.
Indeed, India is now third in the world for recorded cases of COVID-19. But India is 126th in the world for tests per million so it’s reasonable to assume that the real infection rate in India is far higher than the 2.2 million cases it currently reports. While India has had 45,888 deaths attributed to COVID-19, greater than New York at 32,847, India’s deaths per million population is an astonishing 33 (compared to New York’s 1,688). New York reports a total of 451,025 cases and 32,847 deaths. India seems to have a much more favorable ratio of 2.2 million cases and 45,000 deaths. [2.7 million and 53,000 now, for a flu-like CFR of 0.2%.]
Again, if testing in India were more widespread, it would likely show an even more favorable ratio of infections to death.
India has also approached the use of hydroxychloroquine differently. In June, the journal Nature warned that India was ignoring “safety concerns” over hydroxychloroquine. Noting a study in the Lancet, the journal warned, “that the drug offered no treatment benefit, and that people who took it were more likely to die than those who didn’t.” But the authors were forced to correct the Nature article when the authors of the Lancet study withdrew it after questions emerged about the data.
Nature further warned, “Despite the lack of clear evidence that the drug is safe or protects people from coronavirus infection, on 22 May an Indian health ministry task force released the advice for front-line workers, including the police and people conducting door-to-door surveys to estimate the COVID-19 burden to take hydroxychloroquine to prevent infection. The advice expands on a similar recommendation, made in March, in which the task force said that health-care workers caring for people with COVID-19, and household contacts of people with confirmed COVID-19, should also take the drug.”
In July, the Indian Express credited the widespread early intervention with hydroxychloroquine for reducing COVID-19 mortality by half. The authors wrote, “HCQ is obviously not a panacea for severe cases of Covid-19. Given early, it helps reduce mortality by about half, compared to those not given HCQ. In India the drug is widely available and not expensive. A number of Indian states have already incorporated a short course of HCQ in their Covid-19 treatment protocol, and states that have not done so will do well to implement this quickly.”
In the United States, the media vigorously combats accounts of hydroxychloroquine reducing COVID-19 mortality. As I wrote here, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube joined forces to censor American doctors who claimed to have observed positive outcomes from hydroxychloroquine.
There remains a great deal of controversy over hydroxychloroquine. Nevertheless, it seems illogical to hold up New York—an undeniable failure—as a model to be imitated. With higher population density in its larger cities, fewer doctors, and less healthcare spending, India seems to be beating New York’s outcome for COVID-19. If hydroxychloroquine does not get the credit, then what does? [A far younger population.]
For some reason, Cuomo and Fauci have become the faces of responsible COVID-19 policy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Both have advocated policies which seem to have made the pandemic worse in the areas that most faithfully followed their advice. The New York Times faulted Cuomo’s policy on sending COVID-19 positive patients back to nursing homes for 6,200 deaths. For Fauci to praise these actions causes one to also question his judgment.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has become another “get-Trump” project. Legacy media like CNN and MSNBC relentlessly terrify viewers with hyped stories of a murderous plague decimating the population. While the total U.S. deaths approaches 200,000, the disease continues to trail other causes of death in the United States such as heart disease, smoking, and abortion. If COVID-19 deaths top out at around 250,000, it will have been a fraction of the deaths from the 1918 Spanish Flu which claimed 675,000 Americans at a time when the U.S. population was much smaller.
Trump derangement syndrome is silencing real scientific debate and glorifying bumbling autocrats at the expense of public health. There’s something behind India’s success when compared to New York’s failure. We need a fact-based approach, because public health is more important than the 2020 election.
Source: American Greatness
The more that I read and learn about this none so novel virus all the more that the global response proves to be unwarranted but that ”political” representatives where ever they might be are all answering to a higher authority that dictates to them which policies to follow and how to react.
The carefully choreographed closing down of 190+ global economies proves that point exceedingly well.
There’s no time like the present to kick out the Neoliberals or it will be more of the same for years to come.
The shutdown is the clearest example of the moral bankruptcy of New Delhi. The biggest crime the British ever did as a result of the Empire was to create the nation state of “India” where dozens of kingdoms and a couple of empires were united under one administration. To make this simple both the Indian subcontinent and Europe paralleled each other in the development of nations along ethnic, linguistic and faith
-From the 1st to the 10th century Latin was the language of the Church and state in Europe. In the Eastern Roman Empire that included Constantinople the language was Greek.
-From 600 bc to around the 10 century Sanskrit, Pali and Tamil were the dominant languages of the subcontinent for religions and rulers.
-From the 10th century onwards Europe’s languages such as English, French, German etc developed shaping the ethnic groups identities. Kingdoms used these languages to rule their kingdom while Latin continued as the language of the Church
-From the 10th century onward the Subcontinents languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Urdu, etc developed and kingdoms to Empires ruled using these languages that defined the ethnic groups while Sanskrit continued for Hinduism and Pali for Buddhism with Tamil as major classical language of the Dravidians
-While in Europe the kingdoms became nation states by the 18th and 19th century the British Colonial empire decapitated this growth by uniting disparate kingdoms speaking various languages of a diverse ethnic population practicing every major faith except for Judaism under one rule
Unlike Europe where the wealth of each ethnic group be they Italian, English, French or German was realized by their own governments, subcontinent was under one capital, New Delhi who is foreign to large percent of “Indians” (a term never used in the subcontinent prior to the colonial age) who were never ruled by that city before the empire.
the result is that this single capital now rules over 1 billion 350 million people far more diverse than Europe’s 771 million and larger than Africa (1 billion 200 million) or the Americas (1 billion 100 million).
Only Pakistan managed to break free of both London and New Delhi while Bangladesh broke free of Pakistan. the former was created based on religion while the latter is based on language and ethnicity, the two main points of hodge podge of India. The poverty of India is mainly due to the corruption and power of New Delhi.
London simply transferred its power to New Delhi and the creation of India’s army is partly as a new Asian force to deal with Czarist Russia back then and now to deal with the other asian giant China but the people are trapped under the iron fist of New Delhi who enforced the lockdown in just 4 short hours.
Well, let me tell you something, in India even under normal conditions 85% of deaths are not certified as to cause. In rural areas cause of death is just about never recorded, and rarely in urban poor locations, especially slums. That’s when governments are not under pressure to show that they are “succeeding against Covid” by cooking up data. In fact unlike other countries where the alleged “deaths from Covid” are artificially exaggerated, in India the precise opposite is assured; state governments and the Modi regime in Delhi are *both* vigorously suppressing and manipulating data to “prove” that they’re “beating Covid”. In other words the data released by any Indian government, state or national, means nothing at all.
Are you certain you aren’t referring to the U$ cooking the books? While we’re at it, Colin old Buddy, it doesn’t matter who’s elected the U$ is finished, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change the outcome. Death by panic, hysteria, and stupidity is a hard way to go.
In America the election is a sham, entertainment for the masses. India is going the same way. The alternative to the horrible Modi neoliberal fascist regime is….the horrible neoliberal Congress regime. Nothing will change no matter who wins.
First problem, 50k / 2.7million = 0.0185 which rounds up to 2% not 0.2%
Second problem, and I do not know why so many people keep doing this, you cannot predict the future, You do not include active cases in the denominator. You have to divide 50k / (recovered + fatalities) to get the correct percent. So this is 50k / (2M + 50k), this gives you 0.0265 which rounds up to 3% which is still impressive compared to the U.S. but much worse than the number you published.
This is not a matter of choosing a different way of looking at the problem, it is wrong, wrong, wrong but this is almost universally done but it is still wrong.
53k/2.7 million = 0.019 ~ 2%. 53k / (?M + 53k) = ? Are there 700,000 people in hospital now? Don’t know where you got this number. In any case, the ‘case number’ is meaningless. You can practically make it whatever you would like. If you tested the entire population, including for antibodies, and reactive T4 cells, who knows what you would find. The disease seem to be VERY contagious. So a final figure for deaths / million would be a reasonable way to guess the IFR. Maybe off by a factor of 2 or even 10?
From the ECDC as of Aug. 18, 2020
Covid Deaths = 51797
Pop = 1,366,417,756
Deaths/Million = 37.9
This is about ~ 1/15 the death rate in Italy, France, UK, etc. (400-600 deaths per million)
Deaths are still increasing in India, but the rate of increase has slowed very dramatically (I don’t know how to put a plot in here). Maybe the final rate will be 2 or 3 times the current rate, but it will be very low by European (or US) standards.
If it ends at 100 deaths per million that is 0.01%. Let’s say off by a factor of 10 (only 10% of the population infected), then we have an IFR of 0.1% … flu.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Total cases: 2.767M – consistent with the author’s assertion.
This group is subdivided into ‘active cases’ (680k), ‘recovered cases’ (2,700k), & ‘deaths’ 55K.
There are two valid ways to look at it, case fatality rate, which is what I commented on which is well over 2% and not the 0.2% and this was the subject of the article.
You can also look at it as a percent of total population as you were doing to assess potential impact on the country. I am okay with that. I am objecting to this insistence on adding in active cases and calling it a case fatality rate because those cases have not reached a conclusion yet. If you are going to add those in then why not go all in and add the entire population. When you evaluate the District Attorney’s conviction rate, you look at the cases he has already tried, you don’t add in his pending and assigned cases and call it a ‘conviction rate’.
Is this just a bad flu season? It’s worse than that. In the U.S. an average flu season is below 60K deaths per year. We are going to easily exceed that by a factor of 3 and more likely a factor of 4.
likely fake data—dying with covid is not dying due to covid…..if I die in an auto crash and I have the common cold—the cold did not kill me
Studies throughout the world have shown that the great majority of people infected with COVID-19 have either very mild effects or no effects at all. This is not the marker of a serious illness, but of a typical seasonal respiratory ailment like flu, as Professors Ioannidis, Wittkowski, and Bhakdi have repeatedly tried to explain, but which the mainstream media refuse to report. Your term “active cases” or “confirmed cases” is therefore misleading – and probably deliberately so. The latter are people who have been made ill by the virus and therefore come to the notice of medical professionals. You cannot give any accurate estimate of the fatality rate of an illness without taking into account all those infected, including (in this case) the vast majority who have not been made ill by it.
a study in 3 US prisons found 1400 covid infected inmates–only 3 were symptomatic
A lot of doctors and nurses have been muted about the handling of cv19 patients in the hospitals of New York, I’ve seen one or two speak out, saying the practices of the hospitals were killing the patients, if so, this is nothing less than murder. They were, probably still are getting paid more to put the causes of deaths as cv19 in hospitals throughout the world… Very underhanded in any one’s book.