India's healthcare folds under the crisis
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-56972286
If this is Delhi I simply dread to think what is going on unreported in the smaller towns and villages.
300k cases a day and I bet that is not even close to how many there really are along with an underreported death total.
A human tragedy of biblical proportions...
Biggest supplier of vaccines in the world and yet they don't have enough and won't have for months...
Wonder how close we were to similar meltdown? I remember quite a number of hospitals did run out of oxygen here but only got reported by the bbc as "incidents at hospitals".
And also, without knowing how bad it will end up in India, up until now, their death rate has been many many times lower than ours.
In fact that's true of most of the world, but again, you'd never know it from our media.
And I noticed Nicola Sturgeon got referred to in a not nice way in match thread earlier.
Worth noting that covid death rate in England has been 50% higher than in Scotland.
Boris's reckless decisions, compared to Nicola's, have therefore cost an extra 45,000 deaths in England. And that's likely an underestimate as Nicola had one hand and ometimes two tied behind her back by Boris and was unable, for example, to do anything about controlling international travel which is not devolved to Scotland (or Wales or NI).
Controlling incoming travel from last February onwards could have prevented a massive portion of all UK covid deaths, let alone the failure to act promptly at all stages since.
I suspect we have no idea of the death rate in India. Many, many deaths go unreported there and many, many deaths if they are reported have no cause of death because there isn't a doctor available to certify it..
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31857-2/fulltext
When asked about reports that some states had not recorded any suspected or probable COVID-19 deaths, Giridhara R Babu, an epidemiologist at the Public Health Foundation of India, pointed to general weaknesses in vital registration. He told The Lancet that in rural areas, where most of India's population lives, most deaths occur outside the hospital, which can delay registration. “Among the deaths registered under the civil registration system, only 22% are medically certified nationally with cause of death.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/27/india/india-covid-underreporting-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
"It's widely known that both the case numbers and the mortality figures are undercounts, they always have been," said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi.
India is spiraling deeper into Covid-19 crisis. Here's what you need to know
"Last year we estimated that only one in about 30 infections were being caught by testing, so the reported cases are a serious underestimate of true infections," he said. "This time, the mortality figures are probably serious underestimates, and what we're seeing on the ground is many more deaths, than what has been officially reported."