Covid-19: India’s Daily rate of Change vis-a-vis the world

A virus replicates in predictable ways, there is no mystery to it. Given a population size and a growth rate, you can work out the reproduction rate of a virus and make predictions how soon most of the population will be infected. You take that reproduction rate and implement policies that lower that rate to 1 (one person infects one other person) and then to less than 1 – where 10 infected people infect only 9 other people for a reproduction rate of 0.9. The virus’s growth rate (from which you derive the reproduction rate), as reported by the Modi government looks suspicious in as much as the random and wild swings defy explanation. In a small town in a small country like Iceland, it’s theoretically possible that people mingle erratically and that’s why you have a huge jump one day and a huge drop the next. That kind of wild swings are not possible in a highly dense population. Look at the growth rates for NYC and the US elsewhere in this blog; check the recent posts sidebar on the right. India is orders of magnitude larger and denser than NYC.

Modi could be cooking the books to show they have a handle on the problem – a disaster for the people. Or Modi’s government has major inefficiencies in testing – which also spells disaster for Indians. On the day Modi locked down a country of 1.4 billion, March 25, the case count was 536. A month later they are reporting 21K cases today, Apr 22, over at the JHU dashboard.  In contrast, with much lower density and a fraction of the population, NYC reported 464 cases on March 16. Ten days later, on March 26, the count was 23K. Locking down a country of that size with just 536 cases suggests Modi and his coterie knew more than they were disclosing. Remember mad cow disease? And the herd ‘culls’ in the UK and elsewhere? Modi and his BJP may be doing a cull….  of the malnourished poor, and seniors across the income range. Deliberately keeping testing low reduces the official Covid-19 death count, and “bragging rights” that they did better than the Chinese and far better than the Americans or the Europeans. It will be several months later that you will see a spike in deaths. Revealed in death data collated from the issuance of death certificates. Cause of death? “Modi”.