The last time I wrote about India, it was to congratulate them on how well a country with some pretty awful conditions for large parts of its population was managing to keep things so well under control. It is actually possible to keep people in less-then-ideal situations safer than you think, and there’s no better example then our own Downtown East Side… which has pretty much reached what’s being called “significant herd immunity” thanks to the persistent effort of getting all of the at-risk and homeless population vaccinated… even resorting to bribing them with $5 gift-cards to do so. Whatever it takes. It’s the least Covid-infested part of town.

But whatever squalor you imagine on the DTES, it pales in comparison to vast areas of India… which is why it was so impressive that they were keeping things under control. Masks, social distancing, etc. So much for that.

I’ll resume the usual graphs tomorrow, but for today, here is a view of what’s going on over there.

The graph on the left is daily new cases counts since mid-March, with Canada and the U.S. thrown in for comparison.

That’s an insane graph to look at, but raw numbers aren’t necessarily fair when you’re comparing vastly different population sizes… so, the graph on the right normalizes it for every one million of population.

When you look at the graph on the left, you see the sheer numbers and how quickly they’re growing. But the graph on the right tells the real story; a month ago, they were doing well; better than us, and better than the U.S… as far as new cases go. Both countries have been bouncing around an average of ~200 new cases per million population for a while now, but India was down at less than 50 about a month ago… but now, as you can see from the graph, there’s no bounce in their step… it’s straight up.

That is textbook exponential growth, and I really have no idea what they’re doing over there to try to mitigate it… but if you were wondering what happens when you don’t do enough – or when you allow things to derail — there’s your answer.