When New York went in to lockdown, it had ~7000 cases (20th March) [1]

When UK went in to lockdown, it had 6700 cases. (23rd March) [2]

When India went in to lockdown, it had 657 cases. (25th March) [2]

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/20/politics/new-york-workfor... [2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

To top it, some states announced a lockdown a couple days before the country wide annoucnement. TN went into lockdown on 23rd Mar for ex. Overall, I think the local govt of some states (esply Kerala) did well by their people. However, we aren't out of risk by any measure. There are some interesting developments in the region as well. A friend in SG mentioned the 6000 odd cases of migrant workers who tested +ve in Singapore, but during the same period ICU occupancy reduced there, with only one case reaching critical condition .. and recovering. Most migrant workers in SG are from the Indian subcontinent and are generally young and healthy.

It sure feels like there are something not well understood about this virus from infection/death stats alone.

CPI(M) continues to tak ZERO Ls. Lal Salam!

These are confirmed cases, i.e. people who have tested positive. Actual cases, either in India or the UK, are unknown.

Even if India’s number is off by 2 orders of magnitude so the number of cases were actually ~70000 (highly unlikely, since those numbers would show up in hospitalizations), that would 70,000/1.4Bn, so about 1 in 20,000.

NYC at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 1000, and the UK at 6000 cases meant it had approx 1 positive in 10,000.

So even if we assume that the US and UK were not undercounting, and that India was undercounting by a factor of 100 (!), India was about half as infected as the UK and an order of magnitude less infected than NYC when it entered lockdown.

India is a pretty big country and just assuming an equal distribution of cases doesn't seem very useful.

The difference between a confirmed case and all cases is that in a confirmed case is a case which has had a viral confirmation. But all cases still involves only those people who have presented for medical attention, because a case is effectively a file about a person. What is unknown is infections.

Comparing cases is pretty meaningless if you don't also compare test rates.

There is no good metric for comparing test rates as well, tests per million makes no sense when a lot of states within the country have almost zero cases. India's less than 5% positive ratio on tests even in hotspot regions do not indicate a massive lack of testing.

This extremely simple point is missed by almost everyone, to the point where I think it's malicious (hey US media).

> Comparing cases is pretty meaningless if you don't also compare test rates.

True. I'd argue that there are other factors such as demographics, time elapsed since first cases, etc. But I guess it's hard not to. Specially for media needing to fill column inches or otherwise capture our attention :-) It should be possible to simply look at numbers and draw any conclusions but it seems to be very difficult for human beings to do that. We feel the need create a narrative around and find an explanation for our observations.

Also, there are a few factors that are in favor of India. The number of international travelers between China and India is much lesser compared to European countries. I suspect this may have played a huge role in reducing the initial exposure.

Added to that, apart from major cities, international travelers are minuscule in the general population. Consequently, the largest group of exposed citizens are from Mumbai & Delhi. Other cities are relatively less exposed.