India gets hammered

India has just passed Brazil for total number of Covid-19 cases and is now number two behind – guess who? – the US. But the bigger story is the toll on the economy: India’s GDP dropped by about 24% in the second quarter. So the government is under enormous pressure to keep reopening the economy despite the overwhelming increase in cases; it just reopened the subway system in New Delhi.

You may remember that, early in the pandemic, when India’s case numbers were still very low, Prime Minister Modi abruptly shut down almost the whole economy. In theory, that was the right thing to do, since a lockdown of about a month should enable the government to identify all of the current cases and combine testing, quarantining and contact tracing to keep the virus under control from then on. What went wrong?

This New York Times article makes clear what went wrong: The major cities like Mumbai and Delhi are filled with people who came from villages to find work in the then-booming factories. When those all shut down, those people literally had no resources to fall back on in the cities; the only way to stay alive was to go back to their villages, by bus and even by foot. Guess what happened? They spread the virus throughout the whole country, with the result that now it’s growing rapidly just about everywhere. So the lockdown – for which the government gave only four hours’ notice – literally turned into the vehicle for rapid growth of the virus. It’s very likely India will surpass the US for total cases this fall, although it will still be number two per capita.

As the article points out, this has been a huge setback for the country’s growth hopes. Just to keep up with population growth, India needs to grow the economy by about 6% a year; even before the pandemic hit, it was lagging in that regard. Meanwhile, archrival China is growing again, and they have the virus so well under control that they’re allowing activities that most of the rest of the world just dreams about doing. So India may slip from its current position as the fifth-largest economy in the world.

You would think Modi would be hell-bent on doing everything he can to control the spread of the virus, while still carefully reopening the economy. But he continues to push his Hindu nationalist agenda (notably with encouraging the project to build a new temple on top of a mosque that was demolished in Ayodhya), and his popularity is if anything greater now than before the pandemic hit. He evidently thinks he has more to gain politically by dividing the country than by actually fixing the underlying problem with the economy: the virus. Sound familiar?

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into the projected numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 3%.

Note that the “accuracy” of the projected numbers diminishes greatly after 3-4 weeks. This is because, up until 3-4 weeks, deaths could in theory be predicted very accurately, if one knew the real number of cases. In other words, the people who are going to die in the next 3-4 weeks of Covid-19 are already sick with the disease, even though they may not know it yet. But this means that the trend in deaths should be some indicator of the level of infection 3-4 weeks previous.

However, once we get beyond 3-4 weeks, deaths become more and more dependent on policies and practices that are put in place – or removed, as is more the case nowadays - after today (as well as other factors like the widespread availability of an effective treatment, if not a real “cure”). Yet I still think there’s value in just trending out the current rate of increase in deaths, since it gives some indication of what will happen in the near term if there are no significant intervening changes.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5
March 21	244	35
March 28	1,928	275
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889
April 11	12,126	1,732
April 18	18,434	2,633
April 25	15,251	2,179
Month of April	59,812	1,994	1,474%
May 2	13,183	1,883
May 9	12,592	1,799
May 16	10,073	1,439
May 23	8,570	1,224
May 30	6,874	982
Month of May	42,327	1,365	71%
June 6	6,544	935
June 13	5,427	775
June 20	4,457	637
June 27	6,167	881
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
July 4	4,166	595
July 11	5,087	727
July 18	5,476	782
July 25	6,971	996
Month of July	26,649	860	111%
August 1	8,069	1,153
August 8	7,153	1,022
August 15	7,556	1,079
August 22	7,552	1,079
August 29	6,675	954
Month of August	30,970	999	116%
September 5	5,961	852
September 12	6,206	887
September 19	6,406	915
September 26	6,612	945
Month of Sept.	26,726	891	86%
Total March – September	214,467

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 193,253

Deaths reported yesterday: 435

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 3% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above; it was 4% two days ago. There is a 7-day cycle in the reported deaths numbers, caused by lack of reporting over the weekends from closed state offices. So this is the only reliable indicator of a trend in deaths, not the three-day percent increase I used to focus on, and certainly not the one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 6,460,421

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 31,281

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 5%  

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 3,726,099

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 193,253

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 5%

For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post. Short answer: If this percentage declines, that’s good. It’s been steadily declining since a high of 41% at the end of March. But a good number would be 2%, like South Korea’s. An OK number would be 4%, like China’s.

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 5.3%

For comparison, the recent peak for this rate was 27% in late July, although the peak in late March was 75%. This is published by Johns Hopkins (recent rates for New York state: .8%. For Texas: 11.2%. For Florida: 12.3%.  For Arizona: 7.2%).

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com