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Comment by johnohara | Hacker News Reader

Based on over a year's worth of global data, it is reasonable to highly correlate confirmed positive infections with death counts, with only the degree varying from 2% to 6%.

Using "official" numbers alone, and the exponential growth they have exhibited in the past week, it is impossible to deny that an unmitigated disaster is unfolding before our eyes in India.

Speculate and blame all you want, the situation is deadlier and more real than we have seen globally thus far.

It seems to me the most appropriate reaction is to be aghast, and ask "How can I help?"

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Shipping vaccines and materials needed for vaccine manufacture would be a good start.

Reversing this would be good too. https://www.democracynow.org/2021/3/11/rich_countries_block_...

And here's a good article explaining why waiving vaccine intellectual property rights is a misguided area of focus: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/03/15/vaccine-co...

Only if you take a constrained view of what constitutes "property rights."

The emergence of an even worse variant is potentially catastrophic, at least economically - our government can compel Pfizer or Moderna to release the details of the vaccine production process to producers in developing nations or publicly.

Agree. It's disappointing that embargoes on exporting vaccine materials to a country, who under normal circumstances produces so much vaccine for the world, are a matter of emergency use policy.

There are 1.3B people in India. There is no way a vaccine is going to arrive in time or be injectable at a scale that matters. If that was a solution, I'd be all for it, but it is not.

The population pyramid there skews heavily young, so it won’t take nearly as many vaccines to protect the most vulnerable.

You’re missing the issue. Once hospital access is unavailable, the death rate spikes.

Young people are absolutely at risk. I can probably name a dozen <45 who required hospitalization, most briefly. Most of those folks had some impact for weeks or months.

The India variant, B.1.617, is a double mutation that seems to effect younger populations. The new explosion in cases is purported to be related to this variant and is said to be more transmissible than the South African variant.

Making sure that at least the health care people are taken care of would be a good start.

They do have vaccines that they are manufacturing in country.

Are they sufficient to have vaccinated all their health care people?

>"How can I help?"

NGOs with selfless people are the ones which saved many from perishing on the roads during national lock-down in the first wave, Now they are the ones again helping the needy in the second wave where states, unions are taking the initiative for lock downs upon themselves; Yet the result is is same - Poor suffer and perish.

Those who wish to help, please donate to those NGOs. I'm not going name any to avoid spiraling this into another slug-fest and so I'm including a 'List of NGOs providing relief during Covid-19'[1] from the Govt. itself.

[1]https://www.investindia.gov.in/bip/resources/list-ngos-provi...

> Using "official" numbers alone

Those are corroborated by sentinel cases in Australia. The rate has risen to the point where quarantine is struggling to cope, and the doctors' union has suggested a complete ban on flights from India.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-21/nt-covid-active-cases...

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