Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mulvya 1881 days ago
The wave isn't primarily due to loosening of restrictions or slack in behaviour. It's due to, for a lack of a better term, environmental factors.

Look at the countries in the vicinity of India; they all show similar rise at around the same time.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/pakistan/#...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/bangladesh...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sri-lanka/...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/maldives/#...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iran/#grap...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/kazakhstan...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/azerbaijan...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uzbekistan... ...

COVID is seasonal: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.28.21252625v...

Mumbai had the peak of its 'first wave' on October 7th. See mobility trends for vehicular and pedestrian traffic at https://covid19.apple.com/mobility. You'll see both monotonically increasing as the peak approaches and then recedes. If this were a simple morality tale of the level of social contact, this wouldn't be the case.

See this paper for a more thorough look at the epidemiological mysteries of an infectious respiratory disease: https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-42...

1 comments

Well, if you look at a comparison graph of the countries directly adjoining India, the differences are pretty stark.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

That's the magnitude of new detected infections. Pakistan has conducted 1/4th tests per-capita compared to India. 1/6th for Bangladesh. So I don't think there's much to see there. I'm comparing the inflection points and curves on the graphs.
Tge inflection points for the latest outbreaks lag India and are quite probably due to cross-border leakage.
Cross-border leakage with Bangladesh? Possibly. With Pakistan? Hardly.

All of these countries require a recent negative test prior to arrival. The Central Asian countries show inflection at pretty much the same time, barring Uzbekistan which is a week late. However, India has a lot more relative traffic going on with Sri Lanka and they and Maldives, both South of India, inflected a whole month later.