Edit - just to add, the kid mentioned above also recovered, but he was hospitalized for a couple of days with very high fever.
That doesn't matter _if people don't trust the hospitals_. Whether or not there's a reason for it is insignificant.
> as I've not seen the alleged behaviour at all
As an aside, one anecdote doesn't mean that there's no reason to mistrust the hospital. I have elderly relatives in care homes, and I've not seen them abused. That doesn't mean there's not a problem with abuse in care homes here in the UK
While I've heard anecdotally that this happens, I find it hard to believe that this happened during the second wave when hospitals were, in general, being overrun with patients and running out of beds and oxygen cylinders. Why would you want to risk getting caught doing this when you anyway have a long queue of prospective patients waiting for a bed?
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...
May I ask why you wanted them to? Honestly his response sounds rational to me.
If I experienced the same symptoms here in NL, I’d have also taken a test myself just to be sure that I am not spreading it around.
His decision is rational after he explained the reason to me. However, I wish that reason doesn’t exist and that people can get tested without such concerns.
Extremely shameful but not surprising.
Thanks.
Many of my colleagues got sick in Hyderabad and from what I hear the hospitals directly sell drugs in black.
Three of them got admitted to yashodahospitals (https://www.yashodahospitals.com/) and all three of them had to pay 5x the price for Remdesivir. The worst part is this was sold to them by the hospital management.
Also, in India, when a doctor refers you to a diagnostic center for a lab test, the diagnostic center pays the doctor money in the form of a kickback.
It’s pathetic.
I live in the US and the healthcare situation is bad but not as bad as in India. You would never want to get sick in India and visit a hospital there.
The situation is similar in Europe, actually. Including loss of trust.
Its quite easy to get a test done at home. (Mentioned of lister metropolis because they had come home for some other sample collection and mentioned of this) . You can check aggregator apps as well that provide this list.
https://www.metropolisindia.com/parameter/trichy/covid-19-rt...
Wonderful place, except for the heat :-). I've visited there (for the temples) on a few occasions.
Sorry, but I dont find this a good argument in favor of a car-culture at all.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-07/op-ed-drive...
> For each walk-up site, we looked at how many people live within a mile radius and could conceivably walk to the site. You don’t need to look at a map to know that too many people and places are left behind. If you don’t have a car but live in South Los Angeles, chances are you can find a nearby walk-up test site. But if you’re carless in East L.A., there is not a single walk-up option in your community. The entire San Fernando Valley — with a population of almost 2 million — received its first and only walk-up site, in Arleta, in late June.
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-yorkers-without-a-car-ar...
> After trekking nearly two hours on public transit to get to the testing site in Flatbush, a neighborhood in New York's Brooklyn borough, the 30-year-old taproom manager was surprised to discover a line of cars snaking around the address instead of a line of people. McGrath, who does not own a car, approached a state trooper at the testing site to confirm his suspicions that a vehicle was required to be tested.
> "I walk up to one of the state troopers and he says, 'You can't walk in, you have to have a car,'" McGrath told Business Insider, adding that it appeared as though he was not the first New Yorker to arrive at the testing site on foot.
I cited specific examples of people having trouble getting tested without a car.
I spent YEARS taking public transportation in Philadelphia and you know what? It sucked massive donkey balls.
This is why I bought a house in the suburbs. Public transportation is for the poors (and New Yorkers I guess). Sorry not sorry.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The drive through testing really does offload a lot of stress that would otherwise be placed on physicians and pharmacies. The logistics are a huge win. Locally we’ve had unoccupied parking structures used to house the tests. Even without that you basically just need a parking lot, a couple tents, and a restroom.
If you’re so sick you can’t drive you can have DoorDash or any other delivery service send you an at home test. If you’re too sick for that, you probably should call for medical services and not an antigen test.
I’m in Georgia, which has not offered any support for people during the pandemic beyond what the Federal government provided, and it’s pretty easy to get a test due to the efforts of private companies. If you don’t have a car you can often walk up provided there is a sidewalk. We also have testing available in every chain pharmacy and in dedicated facilities that have sprung up in unoccupied mall space or buildings used by bank branches and fast food establishments that are vacant.
I've personally done Nasopharyngeal swabbing in a drive-thru. I will be supervising self-swabbing at a University starting tomorrow. They are very different things. One is a Q-Tip that only gets inserted into the nasal cavity. The tickle-your-brain swab is a different thing entirely. It requires training to do properly (enters approximately 90 degrees to your face) and while I learned how it feels from both sides, I can't imagine someone being asked to self-administer a Nasopharyngeal swab.
I'm in my condo right now, I could go to a 7-11, come back and have my result all within 10 minutes for $3. But yeah car culture in America is great
> If there even is public transportation to speak of
The public transportation here in Bangkok is amazing. It's clean, on time, and affordable
Net-net, COVID-testing privacy isn't a laudable consequence of the US's car culture, at least not everywhere in the US.
Though there the testers/nurse puts the swab in the nose.
But for vaccinated patients with mild symptoms and no major risk factors, staying home and avoiding public testing sites is a reasonable approach.
The anecdote about faking covid test results is plainly wrong. There is a mechanism for registering every PCR-RT test that is done along with the Aadhaar Unique Identity Number. The results need to be validated at different levels. These have been digitised. You can access your parents records online and verify and validate them too. All this is available on your mobile apps. The digitisation and workflow management make faking the results very difficult if not impossible.
Hospitals are specially licensed to treat Covid. Not all hospitals can admit covid patients. It is not like every small clinic or hospital at the corner can simply admit patients. The total bill for ANY COVID RELATED ADMISSIONS are capped. The test fees are capped. There simply is not much incentive to fake results when the fees cannot be charged on whim.
Of course, common people like your parents are fed misinformation by the social media (anti-vaxxers movement in the US) and a lot of fear about corporate profiting, big pharma, etc are the usual trope.
Big pharma sure profits, but they profit most off such staple as baby powder and insulin. Their profits, data of efficiency on vaccines etc are under glare of scientific scrutiny, while their pain killers and opioids are where they don't get any investigation.
The death rates on the other hand in India are under reported and there is a huge backlog that is being cleared right now.
You may not believe it, but India's response to the pandemic has been nothing less than fantastic, given the sorry affairs of its health infrastructure. The mechanisms at every level worked satisfactorily. Were they miraculous? no.
Efficient given the resources? Yep. It could have been worse. Far far worse.
Edit. Oh I forgot to add... our hospitals lost a lot of money and our entire budget. We had to borrow to keep things running and are in the red for the next few years.
So all this 'profiteering'... try running a hospital.
Edit 2: The local administration commandeered our hospitals to set up Covid wards. Admissions were made electronically for hospital based observational wards. Food and medicines were made free for all the admitted patients. Also, Oxygen. Did I tell about the overtime payments to doctors, nurses and paramedical staff? All from the hospital funds. Patients paid nothing. Thats right. Nothing. Not a cent.
Come on, India was probably the only country in the world where there were dead bodies floating in rivers. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57154564
During the second wave in April-May 2021, which India had ample time to prepare for, hospitals just didn’t have oxygen.
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/haryana/ex-envoy-dies-wait...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/21/india-hospit...
States purposely undercounted their death tolls by vast amounts.
https://twitter.com/deepakpatel_91/status/139341986118379930...
That said some states like Kerala and Maharashtra managed the pandemic much better than others like UP and Bihar, so your experience could be based on one of the better performing states.
According to the below article, some communities do practice dumping body in Ganges.
"He further informed that the practise of dead body being disposed in the rivers is prevalent in two particular stretches in central/eastern U.P. and the epicentre of which is in Kanpur Unnao region in central U.P and Banaras-Ghazipur area in eastern U.P"
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/practice-of-bodies-b...
There was also another incident in 2015 from the same Unnao region where they found more than 100 bodies in Ganges.
EDIT: regarding the anecdote about a grandparent asking for this, there's a lot of context we don't know. Rather than a traditional practice, it might simply be a comment based out of frustration about the expense & bother to the family for a "standard" funeral. I also have family from the region and I've never heard of this as a standard routine widespread practice. For the most disadvantaged communities, I can understand it.
One of the comments below linked to a couple of videos, one of which is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DWWeOt4jWM
In this, Burka Dutt is interviewing a local pandit. He says he is not sure if these are all covid deaths. He gives 2 reasons for the increase in number of bodies:
1. fear of covid
2. increase in cremation costs due to increase in covid deaths.
So, those bodies are not necessarily all due to covid deaths.
The video shows a lot of bodies cremated on the river bank. Once the water level rises during rain, the pandit says they will all float into the river.
Also learned that some inter the bodies of infants and unmarried women directly into the river. This may explain the 2015 incident where they found more than 100 bodies, mostly of unmarried girls and children.
Yes, though he's speculating, as are we all. The reality is that bodies turned up in the river at an unprecedented rate just as the rest of the country was struggling with Delta. Bodies floating into the rising river is not something that only happened in 2020. Indeed, if rains are a known issue why cremate so close to the rising river? Pyres were so close to the river because there an unusually high number of them. Nobody would suggest that 100% of them were COVID deaths, but it seems likely a very high proportion of them probably were. Indeed, as the top level headline notes that excess deaths, regardless of the official cause of death is what we need to watch out for as a signal.
> Also learned that some inter the bodies of infants and unmarried women directly into the river
This is actually in line with the standard practice in other parts of the country, ie, burial, rather than cremation, for children and maidens.
> Regarding the grandparent comment, they are definitely not poor. They have a lot of money.
The point is that there is context to the comment we're not privy to. The elderly say many things out of frustration and as a commentary on their own families sometimes. For example, I had a relative remark several times that when he died he wanted to be 'thrown to the dogs', or in the trash. Does it imply that this was a traditional practice in the family? No, but it was a comment on the perceived indifference of his family. Are there communities that practice interring in the river as a traditional practice, and not simply as a cost saving measure, and your friend is from one such group? Perhaps, but if there are they are a vanishingly small group, otherwise the river would be choked with bodies on a regular basis. A body showing up once in a while would not be noteworthy. That so many did in a very short window in the summer of 2020 says that the traditional practitioners probably aren't the source.
Police officials of Unnao have offered an explanation that the bodies were
of "people who were dumped in the river or buried on the banks after their
families could not afford a proper cremation."
Government contractors pressed into removing commemorative burial markers less they be counted by drones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiLzIuMsnW0
Let me find something in English to give context on these shallow graves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q6hYu3EsC0 (will give viewers an idea of the mindboggling scale of the phenomenon)
The following videos are not in English but you should be able to get a sense of the numbers by looking at them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALO0VjfxXDA (pardon the annoying and unnecessary dramatization music)
My point of replying to the original comment which used dead bodies in India's river as a sign of under counting was to question the idea of comparing the current situation to Spanish flu (which killed upto 17-18 million in India). What happened in UP/Bihar (news says up to 2000 bodies were found) is an isolated incident, specific to those states. Can that be used as an indication that the remaining 26 states are hiding, since these 2 are one of the most poorest states in India? I should be hearing news about discarded bodies from other states also right?
> Government contractors pressed into removing commemorative burial markers less they be counted by drones
Since you posted local YouTube channels, do you know how they handled the new dead bodies after the news about this incident broke out?
All was never even the hypotheses, that is a strawman argument. The hypotheses is that this incident, of thousands of bodies floating down the river and buried on the sand bars, is a striking, once in a century phenomena given the numbers. If this was normal we would have seen such numbers prior to covid.
The major reason, as you had noted as well, is the breakdown of the infrastructure for dealing with deaths by a state that is not competent enough to prevent them. Some state did far better than others. You had mentioned two, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Note that the population of UP + Bihar is the same order of magnitude as a middle sized European countries. One does not need other states to contribute if these two are badly hit.
Those were the worst hit states - UP and Bihar. What was observed during the second wave was not normal, something like that last happened in 1918 after the Spanish flu:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57068503 "This is not the first time bodies have floated up in rivers in India during a pandemic.
"The River Ganga was swollen with dead bodies", the famous Hindi language writer and poet, Suryakant Tripathi, better known as Nirala, wrote about the 1918 outbreak of Spanish flu in his village in a province which is now India's Uttar Pradesh state."
The below links say bodies were found in many rivers, not just Ganga.
"A report released by the sanitary commissioner in 1918 later documented that it was not just Ganga that was clogged up with bodies, but all rivers across India."
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic_in_India
I don't think if scenarios such as below are happening in India, the leftist Indian media would stay silent.
“India perhaps never saw such hard times before. There is wailing on all sides. … There is neither village nor town throughout the length and breadth of the country which has not paid a heavy toll.
Elsewhere, the Sanitary Commissioner of the Punjab noted, “the streets and lanes of cities were littered with dead and dying people … nearly every household was lamenting a death, and everywhere terror and confusion reigned.”
https://theconversation.com/1918-flu-pandemic-killed-12-mill...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/pfizer-earnings/inde...
Edit: Baby Powder Lawsuit - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/health/baby-powder-cancer...
Obesity Worldwide - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...
Opioid deaths began with increased prescription - https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html
With that out of the way, I did try to explicitly say that my experience is not first hand and that it is of that from my parents and my frustration that they cannot get tested as often as I can in the NL, and trust the local healthcare setup as I do here.
I for one am a lot relieved to hear from you that the digital systems are put to good use in verifying COVID tests, administration of vaccines, treatment, bills etc. Unfortunately, my parents concerns were still not addressed by these re-assurances. One may still test positive for COVID, but not really need the excessive medical procedures that the private hospitals/doctors do with monetary aims. Even worse, a doctor could simply admit someone for a couple of days and run all the tests only to come up and say after 2 days and a bill of several thousand rupees, - "your covid test was negative", please be careful about your other problems we took care of.
Secondly, if the regional testing centers or doctor's offices are as badly managed and under-staffed as my dad claims in his region, it is hard to trust the rest of the system to work, and not be scared of contracting covid just by visiting the test centre. I realise that India is big, diverse and unequal so it may not be the case where you are.
One of the reasons, I am stupefied, angry and scared is also from your list...
> our hospitals lost a lot of money and our entire budget.
> Did I tell about the overtime payments to doctors, nurses and paramedical staff? All from the hospital funds. Patients paid nothing
At least from a sample size of two (in a country with a couple billion people), it is not true. My uncle and aunt were hospitalised. for "mild" covid late last year, and came back home after 4 days with a fat bill, lot of frustration from defending against what they perceived as needless tests, and of course COVID. A private hospital could still keep the COVID cost to whatever regulatory maximum is, and still do absurd tests to milk the patient's insurance policies :-(
The only way for this system to gain trust is transparency. For patients to take hospitals to court with trustworthy judicial system. However, here we are where India reports a few lakh people died, and researchers claim it is wrong by several orders of magnitude :-(
I trust the sincere work of yours. But, we have a long way before that can be applied to the majority.
You state that you do not have "first hand" experience and yet are pushing questionable narratives from your Parents/Aunts/Uncles (who frankly seem to belong to the irrational "don't get the vaccine" crowd) as fact. Having lived through it all in India, i can categorically state that your narratives are very much false.
You seem to have no idea of the statistical nature of Covid tests; they are not binary. A Doctor has to make a judgement call on the result of the test (eg. RT-PCR) vs. the results of other tests (eg. Chest Scan) which is not easy. Given our limited resources in everything (i.e. Education/Hospitals/Doctors/Nurses as a percentage of the Total Population) it can become rather difficult to convince people of the costs (tests, time and money) involved. While of course there are many problems/inefficiencies with the system and we did drop the ball in preparing for the 2nd wave (as did the rest of the World) overall i would say we have done a stellar job of managing the crisis with the limited resources we have at our disposal.
My only gripe is the shame that is attached to testing positive. The system kicks into extraordinary paranoia when someone tests positive. That is the reason why people refuse to be tested. My MIL did not test for weeks after she started coughing. Thankfully, my SIL traveled from the US forced her to test and admitted her.
I understand the reasons and the struggle of the hospitals, but there is a bit of heavy handedness (nowhere near China, I must admit) that is scaring people away.
I am thankful to the Doctors and nurses of India. They have saved at least two lives in my immediate family.
Pfizer reported that earnings and sales more than doubled in the past quarter, and it raised its outlook for results the full year, thanks greatly to its Covid-19 vaccine.
The vaccine business alone was responsible for more than 60% of the company's sales, as vaccine revenue rose to $14.6 billion from only $1.7 billion a year earlier. The company said its Covid vaccine sales accounted for $13 billion of that revenue. Revenue outside of its Covid vaccine business was up a far more modest 7%.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/pfizer-earnings/inde...
It's the largest part of the business now, and they are protected from downside: Under the PREP Act, companies like Pfizer and Moderna have total immunity from liability if something unintentionally goes wrong with their vaccines.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
As just one example, india STILL does not have a good handle on WHAT is killing people. Up until 2018, there were annual death surveys to determine the cause of death. Think about that - people go door to door and record verbal responses about how people died. That is how poor data in india is.
These are not anecdotes and you should - respectfully - stop taking anything the indian government says at face value.
A very sincere Thanks to You/Fellow Doctors/Nurses for doing such a fantastic job during the most trying of circumstances.
India should be an example of underdeveloped nation managing their covid situation. I'd like these policies to be documented and shared with UN med and shared with the world.
e: Muphry’s Law got me. Comprises or is composed of is fine.
Asking people to use coherent English on an English language forum is a reasonable expectation. I wasn't making a value judgement on the thread OP. I hope this is clear (this is why reading comprehension is important too).
I am not sure how using 'comprises' instead of 'is comprised of' can be considered as reluctance in gaining a basic level of English.
> You want your readers to put in the extra effort required to make sense out of your half-baked messages.
How is the message half-baked just because one word in that whole paragraph was wrong?
> Asking people to use coherent English on an English language forum is a reasonable expectation. I wasn't making a value judgement on the thread OP. I hope this is clear (this is why reading comprehension is important too).
I perfectly understood what 'blocked_again' said despite English not being my first language. I am pretty sure normal humans can process these sentences without any problems. Now if we are talking about 'reading comprehension' for machines, it may be a different issue.
I ran your comment in Word's grammar checker. It suggested a couple of changes.
1. Change 'required' to 'needed' in "required to make sense".
Reason: Clarity. A simpler word would be clearer for your reader.
2. Change 'master' to 'proficiency' in "mastery in language skills".
Reason: Inclusiveness. A gender-neutral term here would be more inclusive.
3. Change 'wasn't' to 'was not' in "I wasn't making a".
Reason: Formality. In formal writing, try spelling out the word.
These are just nits. Not at the same level as using compromised instead of comprised. Edit: Actually this is a non-issue, I responded to the assertion "...As long as you understand what the person is saying it's good enough...".
Your reading comprehension skills need serious work.
So compromise is now the same as comprise? I don't think you have a leg to stand on here.
Replying via edit:
>The point is that everyone is capable of figuring out that it's a typo and I actually meant comprises of.
Like I said elsewhere this is not what I objected to. I was responding to the assertion "...As long as you understand what the person is saying it's good enough...".
It is not good enough. The proper thing for you to do here would have been acknowledging your mistake and correcting it instead of promoting mediocrity.
People have the capacity of making heads or tails out of sloppy writing but why should they put in the effort to do so? It is your responsibility to put your thoughts coherently in the first place. This is the least you can do.
Like I said elsewhere this is not what I objected to. I was responding to the assertion "...As long as you understand what the person is saying it's good enough...".
It is not good enough. The proper thing for you to do here would have been acknowledging your mistake and correcting it instead of promoting mediocrity.
People have the capacity of making heads or tails out of sloppy writing but why should they put in the effort to do so? It is your responsibility to put your thoughts coherently in the first place. This is the least you can do.
At the same time, it's completely pointless to correct someone instead of focusing on the discussion when you totally understand what the other person said.
Both sides of the ideological split here were arguing over the stats until the Ganges swelled up with bodies. But even then, the right continues to deny the extent of death.
To me this is a huge problem: some doctors are gaming the system and providing fake covid certificates or vaccination stamps. What else could doctors be hiding from me in other situations ? My mom said it was a war crime to deliver fake covid vaccination stamps (I can see how a doctor doing that would see himself as a resistant so good luck having a healthy debate about that). It breaks something fundamental. In a way I hope most of them did it for the money rather than out of anti-vax/anti-system.
On a related note I was stuck for three days in a house during this summer's flood (floor level flooded, second okay, I stayed at the third) . I had food, water and was okay. At some point I could have left the house to be relocated in a roofed sport centre or a school with other people but I decided against it in fear of getting covid in a crowded space. It was before omicron. Maybe I overreacted but I didn't want to take any risks.
I honestly don't even know why they keep doing it. You get less crazies as a prison guard and they have better security.
Insurance is also fragile, where an employee that needs their healthcare for something like cancer is then exposed to be laid off and lose coverage.
When you need it most, you are subjected to exploitation and fraud: surprise billing, lack of coverage, and doctors that feign ignorance about costs and complexities.
Meanwhile anyone that knows how billing professionals knows: #1 rule is bill when you can, the #2 rule is to bill as much as possible.
The end result is a lack of faith in our system, where it is just a system of profiteering and exploitation.
They work long hours because they will eventually make a lot of money (my friend is a cardiologist, not even a surgeon, and makes 800k per year in the US) and get huge amounts of prestige. Doctors are the only nerd profession that is cool and sexy. And the number of hours is actually less than it used to be back in the day.
Of course, you don't get as many perks from the drug/device company reps anymore, or have they figured out how to give doctors steak dinners and golf junkets again?
There is a difference between - will I go to the hospital if I get hurt or have a medical need versus do I trust the hospital to not fleece for some care I may not need. The fact that this question needs to be asked is a result of the lack of trust. If there is any profession where there should have been zero tolerance for malpractice, it is this noble medical profession.
Of course my mom is not asking for a war tribunal to prosecute people. She's talking about the gravity of the facts.
What's stupid is your insistence on trying to imply that a remark she made about the gravity of some acts is the same as her saying it's wartime.
And for what it's worth, yes she actually does know what wartime is.
I wasn't aware it was a requirement to be allowed to express one's concerns about the behavior of some people though and to relate it to despicable behaviors she saw first hand.
This holier-thanthou attitude is very well misplaced. It's also significant you choose to single her out on this and say nothing of Macron who made a war time speech. And Macron has way more influence than my mom.
As for macron he is just like most politicians, he uses this idiotic and misplaced war rethoric to fool people and make it easier to suspend rights and liberties.
Yes, words mean things.
But people use words with variations on their meanings to put emphasis or for comical effects or for anything else every day and that's fine. That's what language is for. My mom thinks it's worse than a criminal act and speaks the words "war crimes" ? Good, that captures and convey her feelings better.
You may not like it but people do that all the time and they also make analogies that aren't 100% logical 1-1 mappings to what they are trying to explain.
Better get used to it and keep this word definition rhetoric tactics for people who wants to argue on this level.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...
> For households with the Omicron VOC, the corresponding OR for infection for unvaccinated individuals was 1.04 (CI: 0.87-1.24) and 0.54 (CI: 0.40-0.71) for booster-vaccinated individuals.
2) Keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed and keeping people from dying is a legitimate goal of vaccination, even in the absence of any reduction in transmission. The vaccine remains effective at this. Hospitalization rates for the unvaccinated are leagues higher than the vaccinated.
The paper you quote shows two-dose vaccination (or previous infection) increasing the secondary attack rate from 29% (unvaccinated) to 32%, i.e. worse than nothing. Only a booster reduces it back to 25%.
My guess is that the increase is not due to direct biochemical effects of vaccination/prior infection, but due to people assuming that they're protected and taking fewer precautions. Demographic differences might also play a role.
> After adjustment for confounders, we found that in households with the Delta VOC, the OR of infection was 2.31 (95% confidence interval (CI) 2.09-2.55) for unvaccinated individuals and 0.38 (CI: 0.32-0.46) for booster-vaccinated individuals when compared to fully vaccinated potential secondary cases. For households with the Omicron VOC, the corresponding OR for infection for unvaccinated individuals was 1.04 (CI: 0.87-1.24) and 0.54 (CI: 0.40-0.71) for booster-vaccinated individuals.
For delta, two dose vaccination helps. For Omicron, there is no statistically significant effect of two dose vaccination.
In no case is there an increase from two dose vaccination of attack rates.
That means there’s a big side effect from people not getting vaccinated: the healthcare system has finite capacity and when it’s full of people who wouldn’t be there if they’d been vaccinated, that means space isn’t available for anyone who has some other problem and the healthcare system is losing a lot of expensively trained people due to stress. It is extra hard on them to watch people die for avoidable reasons and many nurses, doctors, etc. have left at least temporarily due to burnout.
So 5% of the population represents 50% of ICU ventilator capacity.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/covid-va... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...
https://covidactnow.org/ uses “at least one dose” for the national map but breaks out their state-level displays as “1+” and “fully vaccinated”.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...
> Our results show that the Omicron VOC is generally 2.7-3.7 times more infectious than the Delta VOC among vaccinated individuals (Table 3). This observation is in line with data from (18), which estimated that 19% of Omicron VOC primary cases in households in the UK resulted in at least one other infection within the household, compared to only 8.3% of those associated with the Delta VOC. Furthermore, we show that fully vaccinated and booster-vaccinated individuals are generally less susceptible to infection compared to unvaccinated individuals (Table 2). We also show that booster-vaccinated individuals generally had a reduced transmissibility (OR: 0.72, CI: 0.56-0.92), and that unvaccinated individuals had a higher transmissibility (OR: 1.41, CI: 1.27-1.57), compared to fully vaccinated individuals.
> Surprisingly, we observed no significant difference between the SAR of Omicron versus Delta among unvaccinated individuals (Table 3). This indicates that the increased trans-missibility of the Omicron VOC primarily can be ascribed to immune evasion rather than an inherent increase in the basic transmissibility.
That last part is why the boosters matter: neutralizing antibodies (which your body stops producing over time after the infection) can prevent someone from getting sick at all, whereas the longer-lasting T cell response helps your immune system fight it off more effectively. If the entire population is boosted, that would have been plenty to fight off Delta but with Omicron we still need a combination of other measures (masks, air filtering/exchange, etc.) and eventually updated boosters to put an end ot it. That doesn't mean that being vaccinated isn't worthwhile, of course: you're still far more likely to have a better outcome if you get it and the window where you're contagious is smaller.
We can't put an end to this virus. It will be around at some level forever.
Once it's spreading at a lower level, your risk of personal exposure is much lower and the long-lasting T cell response becomes more of a focus because that reduces risk to the person and you're less worried about the crunch of many thousands of people showing up at the hospital at the same time because for someone vaccinated it's more like something like influenza where most people have a bad week or two but don't urgently need medical treatment.
keyword being if and meaningfully.
Anyway that fake recipient may still need top notch expensive care to stay alive if he doesn't get mild covid. Are you suggesting that he should pay in full for those care since you state it only harms the fake recipient ?
Also, it increasingly seems that a third dose significantly increases protection against omicron.
Early evidence is that the protection against transmission from the booster appears to be quite fleeting (weeks, not months), so the main reason to vaccinate is really to protect yourself.
People seem to forget much of the world still has no access to vaccines. Every person being vaccinated with natural immunity is someone without immunity missing that vaccine.
https://www.kcra.com/article/nurses-react-covid-19-protocols...
So is France and Canada.
I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you saying that antibodies last 90 days to 6 months? Firstly that's incorrect as antibodies seem to be detectable even after 8 months in the study I'm remembering, but more importantly your immune system is made up of many parts and antibodies are not the primary response to coronaviruses since the antibodies do fade rather quickly.
Instead the many other parts of our immune system are extremely long lived with other coronaviruses and there's no reason to expect they won't be extremely long lived with covid.
In fact the reason you see so many asymptomatic cases with covid is because of preexisting natural immunity to similar coronaviruses.
> If they incubate a new variant themselves are they willing to be held personally liable?
Are you suggesting if we had the tech (we don't) to trace down the exact host where a virus mutates into a recognizably different strain that host should be liable? I think you should really reflect on exactly that would mean and exactly how harmful that would be for society. You do realize every single person in the entire world will either die in the next couple of years or without a doubt be attacked by covid, right? That means you'd basically be putting up a lottery system to see who gets to lose for being "ground zero" for a new variant mutation. This would be completely pointless and would serve only to hurt people with zero chance of helping anyone.
Also, when one of my family members got positive during the first peak, they went to a local government hospital (small town). They got really great care (including 4-5 doses of some injection worth ~10000 Rs per dose if I remember correctly, free food etc), and paid absolutely nothing.
I am from a developing country myself and do understand that this kind of thing happens when a big part of a country is low on the Maslow's hierarchy, but India seems to get it worse somehow?
It's no coincidence that the other country we often associate with scams, Nigeria, is also large and has many English speakers.
There are plenty of scams in (say) China as well, they just target Chinese speakers.
It's not "cultural", e.g. here in Germany we have a huge problem with phone fraud originating in Turkey [1]. The reason why scams are so common for "foreign" countries is relatively simple: fraudsters need people speaking the language pretty well, but do not want attention from domestic law enforcement... meaning you need a remote country with a shoddy/easily bribable law enforcement, speaking the same language as the "target" country, a huge supply of desperate, poor people willing to turn to crime for money and easy ways to transfer money from the target country to the source country and back to wherever the ringleaders are. For English-speaking countries, the biggest country where these conditions meet is India and the Philippines (and historically, Nigeria), for German-speaking countries it's Turkey (with historically close migration links from the post-WW2 "Gastarbeiter" era).
[1]: https://www.bka.de/DE/UnsereAufgaben/Deliktsbereiche/Betrueg...
Why would hospitals admit someone who isn't actually in need of care? If you need hospital care for Covid, it's (almost exclusively) because you need supplemental oxygen, and that's something that's pretty hard to fake.
Edit: the question is: how are these hospitalizations actually done practically. Are doctors faking diagnoses (e.g. hypoxia), convincing patients they need care, which they are persuaded to accept? Or are patients forcibly admitted without being asked?
How? Doctors turn into actors and cheat the public. Anecdotally, my relatives say they were never treated for COVID, but told that they needed admission because they have high risks(diabetes, respiratory troubles, high blood pressure) and need to be monitored in order to make sure COVID is treated early. After 4 days of a battery of tests(non COVID related), they are sent home saying they escaped the wrath of COVID because they were lucky. I don’t know what to say.
A doctor who has even a small kickback on prescriptions from a pharmaceutical company is completely out of the question in my book at least.
In places without socialized medical coverage and low levels of ethical integrity (unfortunately, too many places in the world - especially impoverished states), the answer is "money".
Are doctors "persuading" patients that they need care, and the problem is lack of information about what rights you have to actually refuse, or information about what the symptoms would be etc?
”A medical clinic owner defrauded the Commonwealth of more than $3.3 million by claiming rebates for services not given to over 5,870 different patients.”
Why are you moving goal posts?
Clearly fantasy.
Not sure what your point is.
That’s nearly half the US population.
No private parties at all.
Europe is a big place with many different types of systems. What you're describing sounds like the UK. But places like NL[1] or DE[2] are more like Medicare/aid for all (basic coverage) + Obamacare (mandatory private insurance, sometimes supplementary). The providers may be private practitioners.
NB: I'm not an expert in these systems so I may have gotten some details wrong. My main point is that "European healthcare" isn't a monolith and it's not all state-owned.
Because of those facts, I have trouble even formulating a response to your question - it doesn't make sense to me.
Of all the developed countries, only America treats its non-rich citizens so harshly. Your implied advice that poor people should "just work harder and make more money!" isn't very useful.
All I'm saying is it isn't equitable for one person (who could have not worked a day in their life) to be handed health care on a silver platter while I work the better part of a week to pay for it for my family. Do you not understand many on public health care don't have to work for the better part of a week to receive benefits, and never have? I'm not talking about old people who spent 40 years paying into the system.
If you continued working the same job you have now, but at $7.50/hr, would it be fair to characterize your receiving the same health care you receive now as being handed to you on a silver platter?
And nothing says generous and polite by making the lying, vicious claim that I've assumed ' the poor in America aren't working hard' and that I implied 'that poor people should just work harder and make more money!' It's purely fiction designed to paint me as the evil denigrator of the poor.
>The fact is that plenty of the "poor" work as much as you do, but you think they're somehow enslaving you because you get paid more.
'The fact' that both of you have to put words in my mouth (or alleged thoughts) to make your argument speaks volumes here.
>If you continued working the same job you have now, but at $7.50/hr, would it be fair to characterize your receiving the same health care you receive now as being handed to you on a silver platter?
By handed on a silver platter I was referring to someone capable of working, but who requests (and is handed) health care for free without performing any labor at all at the expense of someone working and paying an involuntary tax. I never said that was all or even most poor. I'm not referring to the poor person making 7.50 buying their own private health insurance. There's probably an argument from some perspective that 'equitable' could mean everyone works the same amount of labor (20 hours or whatever) per month to pay for healthcare, although I'm not sure even that would precisely be equitable. One able bodied person of equal insurance risk pool to another working BOTH more hours AND paying more for same insurance would certainly sound inequitable.
> One person being handed health care on a silver platter while I work the better part of a week to pay for it for my family doesn't sound equitable to me. reply
This exactly implies that if only those poor people worked a "better part of a week to pay for it" like you did, they wouldn't be getting their health care served on a silver platter. Not a straw man.
Of course if you compensate providers for health care through the fruit of your labor and investments, you've earned it and it hasn't been provided to you on a silver platter; I don't think anyone is disputing that.
>This exactly implies that if only those poor people worked a "better part of a week to pay for it" like you did, they wouldn't be getting their health care served on a silver platter.
See my response below:
By handed on a silver platter I was referring to someone capable of working, but who requests (and is handed) health care for free without performing any labor at all at the expense of someone working and paying an involuntary tax. I never said that was all or even most poor. I'm not referring to the poor person making 7.50 buying their own private health insurance. There's probably an argument from some perspective that 'equitable' could mean everyone works the same amount of labor (20 hours or whatever) per month to pay for healthcare, although I'm not sure even that would precisely be equitable. One able bodied person of equal insurance risk pool to another working BOTH more hours AND paying more for same insurance would certainly sound inequitable.
a. They are asked to get admitted "for observation because they are at high risk". If they ask to leave, the doctors ask them to sign a very scary sounding wavier disclaiming the hospital of responsibility for their death.
b. There apparently this one lab that will return a positive covid test if the docs ask them to and they get a cut of what the patient pays.
It needs to be said that I don't know if any of these are true.
I mean if it's just about knowing it yourself so that you can get yourself PCR tested when you known you likely have it (and as such might soon need medical support).
That seems like a valid option for me, though only if available and hospitalized reasonable priced.
For be the difference between self-tests rapid tests and test station rapid tests seem to mainly be:
- if you have self-test
- if you can afford it (test station rapid tests are up to some limit payed by health care, in my case)
- if you need the digital certificate that you did a tests (some places require vaccination + test)
- self-test produce more wast through additional packaging, non-reusable plastic tubes etc.
Of checks notes 73% of all eligible ( 5 years or older, all doses required ( booster included), and it was 12 years or older until yesterday, so there's a huge drop since then). Many were forced by restrictions on everyday life, but still, that's certainly not "limited".
Never heard of that in any of a variety of news sources I consume, without a credible source I heavily doubt it. Instead it seems like doctors currently urge people to take precaution (like getting vaccinated) to keep them away from hospital because of the work load.
> Recently went to the doc for a normal cold. Was standing in a small unventilated corridor for half an hour with several coughing people.
A lot of doctors now offer visits via video chat, if you need a sick leave for work it's often enough just to call the doctor and they send you the papers.
True, there are problems with resistant bugs in hospitals and there are problems with testing facilities. The 'ashamed, stupefied and angry' feeling in Germany however can't be generalized like that: Some feel like they're living in a dictatorship because they have to wear a mask, some are angry because of the unclear and reactionary handling of the pandemic on a political level, some don't believe in science but follow alternative medicine or just think all of it is a big hoax, and there probably many more reasons people have.
Overall, Germany still has a pretty good record on keeping people alive while never using really hard measures. What we really could use though is a more civil communication.
> Never heard of that in any of a variety of news sources I consume,
And I heard exactly the same about Italy from news sources that no one in their right mind would trust, which actually corroborates your point.
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article207311157/Cor...
also check interviews of Prof. Klaus Stöhr - he mentions that regularly.
> A lot of doctors now offer visits via video chat, if you need a sick leave for work it's often enough just to call the doctor and they send you the papers.
they need my physical HI card every quarter ...
> Overall, Germany still has a pretty good record on keeping people alive while never using really hard measures. What we really could use though is a more civil communication.
Deaths per infections is relatively high compared to other EU countries. Again, check Prof. Stöhr interviews.
Source?
BTW - it's only an anecdote, but a coworker in DE had a very different experience. After a week of significant symptoms but self-administered rapid tests coming back positive, they contacted the hospital for a checkup. Upon entry they received another rapid test: as soon as it came back positive, the hospital verified that their lungs were functional and then sent them home as quickly as possible.
Why see a doctor for a regular cold? I've never heard anyone do that here in Sweden.
As for hanging around in a waiting room, I agree it's insane on many levels. I usually ask very directly if it's okay to come back in a while instead of waiting around. Though my primary health care provider has people with a cold wait outside in their garden, which is much better if you come prepared.
https://www.dak.de/dak/ihr-anliegen/corona-telefonisch-krank...
You also have to be aware that around 25% of all Germans are in one way or another prone to believe in conspiracy theories, e.g. great reset and so on. Sadly I only have a German source on this, but this was a major point of discussion in the long running "Mitte Studie" which is one of the best and most rigorous studies about Germans and their political beliefs.
If this happened you certainly need get it to a lawyer. It is not much, but there are some way for recourse. You almost certainly have permanent damage after intubation.
https://www1.wdr.de/daserste/monitor/sendungen/gefaehrliche-...
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article207311157/Cor...
Particularly if said by a person that says “Arab Familienclans”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s157CbfS5xg&list=PLuiYhcgFTm...
> Unsafe Doctor waiting rooms
what source? it's trivial to verify. visit a couple of doctors in the city of a large German town and count number of people sitting in a room with special notice to those who are coughing and sneezing ...
> dubious testing kits
I'm not aware of systematic audits of test kits. In Germany a device is considered alright if it has a CE printed on it and maybe some other numbers. That's a usual source of many problems with food, toys etc. nothing new here. Also it's currently in the media that not all test kits respond equally to Omicron - so, it's not like they are standardized. They are now starting device specific audit to check for sensitivity.
No. I'm a software engineer for clinical studies and medical devices and this is not true for any medical device, which includes antigen tests, at all. Also these tests had a time limited special permit which ran out a few months ago, which is why they were able to be sold. here is a FAQ about antigen tests: https://www.bfarm.de/DE/Medizinprodukte/_FAQ/Antigen-Tests/f...
>Die Neubewertung hat ergeben, dass ein gravierender Versorgungsengpass und damit das Interesse des Gesundheitsschutzes an einer Sonderzulassung entsprechender Tests nach § 11 Abs. 1 MPG durch das BfArM nicht mehr besteht. Diese Bewertung wird ab dem 15. Juli 2021 für die Antragsbewertung aller laufenden und neu eingehenden Anträge nach § 11 Abs. 1 MPG zugrunde gelegt.
seems like you're up for a surprise.
PEI has been validating tests for months.
https://www.pei.de/DE/newsroom/dossier/coronavirus/coronavir...
Never heard that this is a problem in Germany. Maybe because Poland is so much worse in regards to healthcare.
https://www.zdf.de/verbraucher/volle-kanne/studie-zu-kranken...
https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/sepsis-deutschland-kr...
> Never heard that this is a problem in Germany. Maybe because Poland is so much worse in regards to healthcare.
Then you are not well informed.
This out-of-touch anglophile elite is the reason India is so dysfunctional, even more than other poor developing countries.
Ie: budgeting priorities; India over budgets IITs and other elite institutions over other colleges and primary education. This results in a system with excellent top universities, but a steep drop in educational quality in tier 2 institutions (and very low educational outcomes in public primary and secondary schools).
The government also focuses on agricultural price stability over farm income (ie banning agricultural exports during high prices).
One can argue that the popularity of Modi and the other regional satraps (with language based sub nationalism) is a result of this institutional bias. Imagine how you would vote if you couldn’t participate in the economy of your hometown because all the street signs/store names were in a language you couldn’t read.
Given the farm law protests I don't know if you can pin that one on the anglophone elite.
I suppose the British did introduce some technology and civic systems, but they also probably fractured the society and created a new kind of caste system.
How much of today's seeming culture of corruption in India is a legacy of colonialism vs. how much was there already? I'm asking because I'm only looking from a distance.
Also makes me wonder if the Chinese cultural revolution, while a disastrous failure on very many levels, might have erased a lot of the legacy of past colonialism... for the same reason that a gigantic natural disaster might lead to shiny new infrastructure after everything gets rebuilt.
In the interest of a civil discourse. I will say that I did mean that I am not surprised by the fact that the stats are not correct because I am aware of the ground reality from my anecdotal sources that point in the same direction. Not that my country does or doesn’t do anything.
The first step to solving a problem is recognising that it exists, and not wish washing it away.
As an Indian, I’m sad that you’re not angry.
The Indian state of Kerala would like to differ.
States and leadership that are more keen on disrupting the social fabric, polarize it to gain votes, sure that would divert resources into such harmful instruments. The consequences were well observed as dead bodies by the thousands buried on river sand bars or floating down the water, with government officials working to conceal the evidence by removing religious commemorative markings left on the sand graves.
Kerala chief minister who is a communist is coming to US for health care next week.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/kerala-chief-minister-...
Older people have attachments other than their grown-up children.
I wholeheartedly agree with their choice, and will do my best to help them where they are.
I'd visit if it would be of any help.
I find it hard to believe that they are unable to get tests. During the peaks, it may have been true. Outside of that, there was no shortage. And we don't even need to go to hospitals for covid tests, there are plenty of independent labs. So, if their parents don't trust hospitals, they can go to those testing centers instead. Many in my family did that, that too 2-3 times (since they have to show negative RT PCR result for travel).
Yes, he is probably just dissing his country to earn some "brownie points".
A friend of mine works as a cop. One day someone got shot and he had to help get the victim to a hospital. The victim was bleeding blood and eventually died in that hospital. A few hours later, the hospital provided the cause of death as COVID, because they found out that the victim had the virus ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
An Indian expat living in NL, with parents living back home in India. My (retired, old) parents are afraid to get tested for COVID because they hear way too many incidents from their neighbourhood about “hospitals faking COVID test results just so that they can admit them for 4 days, administer expensive drugs, charge them some hefty bill, and send home”. As stupid as it sounds, I could not force my parents to go and wait in the line to get COVID test, after he says “I believe I don’t have COVID now. But if I go to the testing center that is so badly managed and understaffed where only people with obvious high level of COVID are brought to get official result, I will get COVID there!”.
Say what you will, but if the basic trust in doctors and healthcare is lost, how would people get tested, and how can you trust any statistics from there?!
I’m ashamed, stupefied and angry at the same time.