Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aardshark 1022 days ago
Do you live in a first world Western country and is your social circle comprised of people who do the same? In my experience when you go outside of that circle you start finding people who have personally experienced loss from COVID very quickly.
2 comments
thesaintlives 1022 days ago
I found completely the opposite. I spoke with all my Indian colleagues. Covid? What's that they said. No problem here Sir..
link
free_glamorgan 1022 days ago
Covid seems to be, physically and emotionally, a primarily Western disease. And as bad as the fallout has been where I live, it seems to have been particularly damaging in the US (on both of those counts).
link
wkat4242 1021 days ago
Seriously, the Indian variant (I forget which letter they gave it) was pretty devastating over there. I have many colleagues and they all know people who died, if not in their own family.
link
free_glamorgan 1021 days ago
The official statistics on Covid deaths in India showed a mortality rate 1/10th that of the US. There would need to be more than an order of magnitude error in reporting for their death rate to exceed that of the US.

FWIW, calling it the "Indian variant" is apparently not ok. Do you mean Delta?

link
ceejayoz 1021 days ago
That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60981318

> More than 4.7 million people in India - nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest - are thought to have died because of Covid-19, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report.

> Three large peer-reviewed studies had found that India's deaths from the pandemic by September 2021 were "six to seven times higher than reported officially". A paper in The Lancet by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research centre, uses subnational all-cause mortality data from 12 Indian states. They come close to the WHO's estimation.

link
free_glamorgan 1021 days ago
I'm aware of that, which is why I made the point that it would only bring India's Covid death rate to around the same as the US and other Western countries. It is also of no help to the discussion around my original point, which is the idea that a very large number of people don't personally know anyone who died unexpectedly of Covid.
link
wkat4242 1020 days ago
India was very badly affected in the cities, much more so than western Europe. That their overall rate is low is also because of the huge rural areas.
link
free_glamorgan 1022 days ago
Statistically, a social circle comprised of first world, Western, overweight and inactive and generally older folk should have the most susceptibility to death from Covid.
link