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Comment by djanogo | Hacker News Reader

This. It's amazing how first world countries are loosing democracy while 3rd world countries are going back to their normal schedule. Look at the cases in India, flat lined in last few months.

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Are you suggesting that the Indian numbers are in any way accurate?

I'm not confident in western numbers either. There's a definite conflict of interest when governments are tasked with collecting data which rationalizes their use of emergency powers.

There are government-independent studies that roughly reflect similar numbers. CMU's Delphi team has an interesting survey - no media involvement needed, they offer an API.

Studies are worthless if the data reporting by the source (hospitals) was inaccurate. We have strong reason to believe bias since emergency funds were allocated to places with the highest covid count

> emergency funds were allocated to places with the highest covid count

Wouldn't this be how we would expect things to work? Places with more infections need more resources. It seems to me like the "strong reason to believe bias" is the exact same evidence as "this is how I would expect it to work in absence of bias".

Right new York under Cuomo, widely hailed as a star governor with regards to covid, misreported up to 12000 deaths, which only came to light officially when the lieutenant governor took over.

It doesn't matter, panic is gone, they are not scared anymore as they got used to fact that >99% of them are surviving. >99% survival is very acceptable for countries where preventive health check ups does not exist.

In those countries people die all the time due to reasons which could have been prevented with regular health check ups and care, COVID restrictions were only making it worse for people who have to work everyday to pay for that days food.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/31/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday...

5 states have fewer than 10% of their ICU beds remaining. The public death rate of victims who receive treatment when necessary has virtually no relation with the reality of "number of people requiring medical care > medical care available". If those 5 states weren't doing even the minimum of vaccines/distancing/masking that they're doing today, they would be at 0% capacity, without question.

Definitely what Australia is doing is too much, but opening everything and leaving it to individual choices is an incomprehensibly bad position.

> If those 5 states weren't doing even the minimum of vaccines/distancing/masking that they're doing today, they would be at 0% capacity, without question.

Is there evidence of that? From my limited and non-expert perspective, it seems that states that had substantial restrictions (California) experienced the same types of waves that states with barely any restrictions (Florida) experienced at different times. It seems like we have a lot less control of these waves than we think we do.

The restrictions were uniformly unenforced throughout the USA. Enough people ignored them without consequence, so the pandemic effects were similar to states without restrictions. I live in CA, notorious for their "strict" stay-at-home orders and mask mandates. If I wanted to, I could have easily gotten in my car, violated those orders by driving around, found a restaurant violating those orders, sat down and eaten there, totally unmasked. If this was the situation in one of the "more locked down" states, then it's no surprise that the virus spread similarly to states where there were few restrictions.

The funny thing about India is that at the beginning of 2021, Covid was considered a thing of the past. Cases flat lined. The government was so confident it was trying to export vaccines to curry diplomatic favour.

Then delta came. Turns out being infected with one variant doesn’t offer as much protection against another variant as being vaccinated. (https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...)

> The new evidence shows that protective antibodies generated in response to an mRNA vaccine will target a broader range of SARS-CoV-2 variants carrying “single letter” changes in a key portion of their spike protein compared to antibodies acquired from an infection.

So yeah, life is back to normal in India. Until the next variant.

That is not true. There were some known cases of reinfections but not at a higher rate than breakthrough infections. And recent sero surveys have reported 60-80% of population is exposed to the virus either through vaccines or infections. On top of that nearly 60% is now vaccinated and new vaccinations are hitting 10 million per day. And yes, neither the government nor people here want lockdowns or masks (people at least).

So no. Next variant might affect India but no more than the other countries still enforcing crazy lockdowns.

Source: all over the news

Huh, countries with rising cases and not enough people with Covid antibodies are going to lockdown, and countries that are past their peak waves are going to open up - till the next wave if any.

There were tough curfews in India and police literally beating up people on the streets.

https://scroll.in/video/957293/watch-indian-police-are-beati...

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