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Science

Over 300 Million Indians May Have COVID-19 (reuters.com) 132

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
About one in four of India's 1.35 billion people may have been infected with the coronavirus, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing a source with direct knowledge of a government serological survey, suggesting the country's real caseload was many times higher than reported. From the report: India has confirmed 10.8 million COVID-19 infections, the most anywhere outside the United States. But the survey, whose findings are much more conservative than a private one from last week, indicates India's actual cases may have crossed 300 million. The state-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which conducted the survey, said it would only share the findings at a news conference on Thursday. The source declined to be named ahead of the official announcement. It was not immediately clear how many people participated in the latest survey.
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Over 300 Million Indians May Have COVID-19 More

Over 300 Million Indians May Have COVID-19

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  • If it is really the case that the virus has spread that far and wide, India may have herd immunity before a vaccine. But if that is the case, why are Indian hospitalization and death rates so much lower? The rest of the world could learn some lessons.

    • Re:Herd immunity before a vaccine (Score:5, Informative)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @03:58PM (#61024606)
      India has 6% population above the age of 65 years, the USA has 16% population above 65 years. If you then take a look at the hospitalization and infection fatality rates of Sars-Cov-2, it is not surprising that India has much lower ratio of people being hospitalized and dying with Sars-Cov-2.

      Also, you can bet that for larger parts of the population in India than in the US, causes of death are not thoroughly examined.

      • still, 300M is probably exaggerated. 50-100M, I wouldn't be surprised however.

        • The apparent death rate for covid varies mostly on the basis of how well the disease is being in detected and how young the population it. So any place with sufficient medical access that reports over 10% death rate simply isn't measuring it's population numbers. Conversely any place reporting less than 1% death rate that isn't blessed with a youthful population probably isn't accounting for it's deaths right. But Deaths are much easier to notice than latent or unreported infections. So if india really

          • typo: 3 million dead at a minimum (not 30 M as I wrote). And it doesn't have that. So the case rate is proabbly more like 10 Million. maybe 20.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bsharma ( 577257 )
          Recent estimate for U.S. is 90 million. Matches well with India's 300 million. "Officials say the drop is likely due to a higher number of people who've had the virus than official counts suggest, as many as 90 million people, and fewer people traveling than did over the winter holidays" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/he... [dailymail.co.uk]
        • Mutations can occur anywhere but the more infections increase chance for a new resistant variant. Slowing spread allows time for vaccine development and treatments. Poor people have to work to live and containment not always viable vs starving. Yet we have folks appalled at having to where a mask in closed public places like a super market.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Herd immunity before a vaccine (Score:5, Informative)

      by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @04:02PM (#61024622)

      If it is really the case that the virus has spread that far and wide, India may have herd immunity before a vaccine. But if that is the case, why are Indian hospitalization and death rates so much lower? The rest of the world could learn some lessons.

      Population pyramid India [populationpyramid.net]

      Population pyramid USA [populationpyramid.net]

      This was always going to happen. On top of that, if you are old with diabetes/heart condition/weakened immune system in a developing country you are already dead. COVID has been a disaster in rich nations precisely because we have become so good and keeping people alive against the odds.

      Have a look at the pyramid for some african countries to see why COVID isn't going to be an issue for them (it will still ravage their older folks, but as a percentage of the population it will be tiny).

      Nigeria [populationpyramid.net]

      • it's mostly a handful of medications keeping them alive. There's no odds there. We know and understand the science of keeping people alive and healthy, it's just a question of which people get those meds.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Well, that and not being taken out by cholera, malaria, TB or pollution.

          TB gets 10% of Indians alone. Tumors get another 9%, and diarrhea 5%.

        • Re:I wouldn't call it "against the odds" (Score:5, Insightful)

          by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @05:08PM (#61024890)
          If it's a handful of medications keeping people alive, they're not terribly healthy. The US has one of the world's highest obesity rates (I think the only reason we're not #1 is because Mexico overtook us and there are a few small Pacific island countries where the native population did not genetically develop to have a diet high in carbohydrates) and the drug use/abuse rates are also among some of the highest. People could live to the same old age thousands of years ago (The philosopher Diogenes who basically lived like a modern bum lived well into his 80s) much like they can now. The difference in the average life expectancy is that we largely eliminated the leading causes of death that kept people from getting to that age in the first place.

          But now we're just faced with a different set of things that kill people. Some of them like heart disease are largely self-inflicted due to poor life style choices. Others like cancer can be similarly self inflicted (e.g., smoking) or simply the result of genetic predisposition, which we certainly understand to some degree, but don't have a pill (at least not yet!) to prevent. Historically a lot of people died in childbirth or from illnesses contracted shortly thereafter. Most of these are now easily treatable where once they were out of reach for anyone regardless of social status.

          Even the medication we can give to people to help keep them alive isn't an ultimate panacea and abuse of those medications have lead to resistant strains of bacteria that can no longer be stopped by that medication. There's no question of distributing medication to anyone here because no one has anything to distribute. The rest comes down to cost of treatment since not every treatment is merely just giving someone a pill. If you're horribly incensed by the costs, I'd suggest changing jobs and researching a less expensive alternative instead of complaining about it on the internet which does no one any good, with the possible exception of yourself assuming it makes you feel better.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by guruevi ( 827432 )

            I agree with this notion, perhaps a bit anecdotally, we had an old family member who basically had their life extended by 20+ years through modern medicine. What started out as aggressive, metastasized cancer turned into feeding tubes and implanted ports to colostomy and urostomy bags, oxygen supplies, they had it all, with regiments of daily antibiotics to keep an otherwise barely functional digestion and respiratory system from getting infected. And literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual tre

      • Re:Herd immunity before a vaccine (Score:5, Insightful)

        by helga the viking ( 4796617 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @05:14PM (#61024902)
        The problem with COVID is we don't know if it will mess with peoples health long term. Eg: 3+ years time all those people with zero symptom COVID get lung x-rays and they have smokers lungs?

        Good luck with any advanced nation health system to cope with that unless they are expanded massively/permanently.

        Now add in the cross-over with other illnesses a person can get during their lifetime, so suddenly COVID may have made other conditions more dangerous because it messed with somebody's heart, lungs, brain, spleen, arteries. IMO there is no herd immunity without risk when you do the top-down analysis of how this combines with other complex factors.

        Anecdotal to my point of view but of the 4-5 statistically perfectly healthy people I know who got zero symptom covid, there is on that now has deep vein thrombosis, another one with a faulty spleen.

    • "If it is really the case that the virus has spread that far and wide, India may have herd immunity before a vaccine."

      There's an additional billion and 88 millions of them Indians.

      300 millions out of 1388 millions isn't THAT much, 22%.

      • Exponentials go fast ... two more months.

    • You also have to wonder if the general pollution/viral/infectious load in at least the major cities in India has trained/selected the general population's immune systems for more active duty, and maybe it's better able to differentiate between environmental factors and invaders (or protect the body against both in general).

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Cylix ( 55374 )

      Unlike the US they have been using HCQ to make sure their healthcare workers don't die of the symptoms. Their reporting isn't jacked up either.

      It burned through those it was going to and the death rate there has been a non-factor.

      You can whine all you want, but the numbers are there for anyone to view.

    • Yes, the lesson of: poor sanitation leads to a stronger immune system. Not exactly the direction we want to go.

      • Well, not *that* poor.

        But yeah, most of the times you do not die.

        But: Don't forget the number of times where you will be so sick and in pain that you will *want* to die. ;)
        People always forget that part. Survival rate ain't everything.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Haven't you heard? Herd immunity does not work for COVID-19.

      • Herd immunity does work for COVID, but it's not what you think it is. It's a concept from epidemiology: It means that a virus can't spread if enough individuals are immune to keep the R value under 1, i.e. each infected person on average infects less than one other individual. Before vaccination, you can achieve a similar effect by reducing situations where infections can occur (lockdown, masks, keeping your distance, etc.). If you hope that letting the disease run its course will result in herd immunity, y

          • The best vaccines are highly effective and can be relatively quickly adapted to mutated variants of the virus. Lack of observed herd immunity from natural infections (which is exceedingly unlikely anyway) does not contradict the possibility of herd immunity through vaccination.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      So much for Inidia's beat them and force them into their homes methodology that overly politicized fanatics praised at the time.

      • It worked in China and India likes to think of itself as the next China, but in the end they only had the choice ... eat or lockdown.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      What hospitals? This is India we're talking about, there are entire classes of people that don't have access to anything solely based on their last name (yes, although abolished, caste systems are still commonly practiced, even in cities).

      Death rates have a similar problem that, you have to be diagnosed with COVID before being counted as a COVID-death and most countries, unlike the US, do their best (I know this is practiced in most European countries) to count people primarily for any other reason than COV

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Well, that'd be true if India had a population of around 400 million. But it doesn't. It has a *billion* more people than that, so there's a long, long, *long* way to go before we're getting anywhere near herd immunity.

      I've always said that we should take the COVID data coming out of India with a big grain of salt. For example the relatively low positive test rate it showed over quite some time didn't necessarily indicate that the program was getting ahead of the epidemic in the population as a whole, b

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      I'd expect that extrapolating a study like this to the entire population of India may be problematic. Covid does not spread randomly. If the study was localised, it may have captured one of the worse affected areas, and the results not valid outside that local area.

      • Exactly. The known outbreaks and deaths appear to have been concentrated in a few major industrial cities; Mumbai and its satellites, Pune, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai. Most rural areas appear little affected, including some where there are significant levels of older and well off people. You can be sure that the last group will have infections hospitalisations and deaths among them recorded.

        See https://www.covid19india.org/ [covid19india.org]

        Interestingly on that map, see Kerala in particular which shows a high rate of rec

    • If it is really the case that the virus has spread that far and wide, India may have herd immunity before a vaccine. But if that is the case, why are Indian hospitalization and death rates so much lower? The rest of the world could learn some lessons.

      Same reason most researchers think the death tolls in the US are higher than official reports. Lots of people dying at home without being properly evaluated for coronavirus. Particularly outside the small middle class where a lot of people straight up can't aff

    • Herd immunity through uncontrolled spread isn't likely for a virus that mutates at even a moderate rate. Instead we'll have dozens of strains, some of them vaccine-resistant.

      How's herd immunity working out for the common cold? (picornavirus) Or for Herpes Simplex? Or for Hepatitis C (hepacivirus) ? We've had hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, to develop it. Yet here we are, trying to make vaccines for them like a bunch of chumps.

  • There is likely a very significant undercount (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @03:54PM (#61024582)

    I recently tested positive for Covid, and I can attest to how seditious the disease really is. Because I had almost NO discernible symptoms. I had a few very, very minor symptoms, but honestly I can't look you in the eye and tell you they weren't just in my head. I didn't lose my sense of smell, had no head aches, ran no fever. The only thing I had was a very minor pressure on my lungs, practically non-existent. I went jogging that day. And again, if someone said "that sounds like just a symptom your brain made up", I would agree. If my wife hadn't had some symptoms early on (namely the loss of her smell), then I wouldn't have gotten tested and there would not have been any reason for me to go get tested. I could have easily gone to work, church, school, anything I wanted, and would not have known I was spreading a highly contagious disease.

    So, in view of that experience, when looking out to particularly young nations like India and Vietnam and many African nations, I can absolutely imagine there is a very significant under count of Covid cases around the world.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Seditious? That word does not mean what you seem to think it means.

    • The US is ca. 250 years old, compared to India and African countries, with much of their population lines having been there for millennia. But *they* have been unified nations for less than the age of the US. By "young", you're referring to ... industrial/technological development? Or maybe something else?

      • Re:There is likely a very significant undercount (Score:4, Informative)

        by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @04:28PM (#61024720) Homepage

        I think "young" in this context refers to the average or median age of the populace. That metric is very relevant for COVID-19 outcomes.

      • I got "young" as in age out of that. Quick google shows India with an average age of 29. 37 for China, 48 Japan, 38 US.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Young in terms of development probably but since when is the residence of the population a factor? According to wikipedia "India has been a secular federal republic since 1950" so the nation is ~70 yrs old.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          The founding of a country can be fuzzy. India became fully independent in its mostly modern form in 1947 with the partition into India and Pakistan and the passage of the India Independence Act by the UK Parliament. How self governing they were before that I'm not sure but it seems one reason it took so long was the animosity between the Hindu and Moslem populations.

      • Funny story, Australia is only 120 years old (Federation in 1901), or if you argue the colony rather than the nation state, it's 231 years (1788).

        The National Anthem contains the line "We are young and free" to reflect the relatively young nature of this new nation, but then 2020, the year of the woke uprising took effect
        The perputual activists who always have something to complain about decided that the Aboriginal populations (plural) have been in some parts of the land for 50,000 years, so it's not yo

    • You will get people deeply resistant to that idea because what it results in are numbers suggesting that COVID is pretty much insignificantly more dangerous ...than the flu.

      In Sept, WHO announced with breathless excitement that COVID was estimated to have infected 1/10 of the worlds population, ie 750 million people.
      They had previously announced that about 1 million people world wide had died from COVID.
      1/750 = 0.13% IFR (And let's remember that this is likely largely overreported; for at least the first 6

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dmay34 ( 6770232 )

        That is a really dumb take. The flu doesn't kill over 450,000 Americans every year you absolute dolt. It kills less than a tenth of that, you moron.The flu doesn't max out hospitals across America and fill ever ICU bed every year you complete idiot.

        How can you possibly be such an absolute dolt?

        • Um, because I'm actually LOOKING AT THE NUMBERS. (That's how science works. It's not fueled by your sense of outrage and ad hominems.)

          1) First is contagiousness. IF something is multiple-times more contagious, then at the same IFR the deaths will also be multiple-times as many.
          Grabbing data from 2017, CDC estimated 45 million cases, 61000 deaths. (IFR = 0.13%...lookit that, JUST LIKE COVID!)
          Covid is believed to have actually infected nearly 7x as many people by this point in the US so 450,000 is roughly

    • Broad testing in various places has indicated that the dark numbers are about similar to double the number of Covid19 cases with symptoms. My wife had it early December in a light way, similar to a light flu, yet she's got no energy to work or be physically active in any way. Just an anecdote to contrast to your case. Another anecdote: I tested negative in the critical window after my wife's strongest symptoms, and had no symptoms at all.

  • Forgot (Score:5, Informative)

    by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @04:22PM (#61024694)

    I think they forgot an important word. I'm relatively sure that "Over 300 Million Indians May Have COVID-19" should have read "Over 300 Million Indians May Have Had COVID-19".

  • Not surprised. (Score:3)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @06:02PM (#61025056)

    You try counting people in slums or rural villages that have never seen a doctor and probably nobody even knows exist.
    I figure for a big part of India, Covid was not ever exactly their biggest concern of the day.

  • An epidemiology model for the US says 26.2% have been infected as of January 19. The model estimates what might have been measured based on what has been measured. https://covid19-projections.co... [covid19-projections.com]

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