The covid situation in India is horrendous: 350,000 infections a day, 2500 deaths. After an apparent delay, the United States is sending help.
The statement in the first two tweets can be found here.
This list of what is being sent represents the most urgent needs, the things that are most likely to make a difference quickly. Discussions between the two countries continue.
There’s been a lot of impatience on Twitter about DOING SOMETHING. But arrangements must be made between the two governments on what is needed and the best way to deliver it.
Sadly, the virus has its own timetables built into it, and we will not see significant changes in India’s situation for at least a few weeks.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
guachi
At this point, my initial thought is that a sustained coronavirus outbreak is a sign of government failure.
It’s too bad that failure had to be in such a populous country
MattF
Note that the true COVID numbers in India are probably -several times- worse than the reported numbers. It’s a real disaster.
Sloane Ranger
The UK just announced this afternoon that we are also sending help to India, including ventilators and oxygen concentrators (whatever they are).
Baud
@guachi:
Right wing nationalist governments everywhere have failed the COVID test. Including here.
JoyceH
What’s missing from that list of supplies, it seems to me, is PPE. For the population. If we could send them a billion vaccines and a hundred thousand people to administer the shots, it wouldn’t slow down the pandemic probably for several months. What could slow it down, within weeks, would be for everyone to mask up with high quality masks.
Baud
From a purely realpolitik standpoint, US wants to contain China by bolstering alliances with its neighbors. This is a part of that.
Cheryl Rofer
@Sloane Ranger: An oxygen concentrator uses molecular sieves to concentrate oxygen from the air. It doesn’t need oxygen cylinders, runs on electricity.
Baud
@Sloane Ranger:
I’m sure there was coordination, as Cheryl says.
Wag
@Sloane Ranger:
Oxygen concentrator are small machines that pull room air through them and extract the oxygen, and then blow purified O2 through a hose to the patient. These machines are becoming very refined and battery powered portable machines are routinely used by patients with lung disease to leave the home and live normal lives.
Wag
@JoyceH:
Agreed, but we didn’t have the capability to do that for ourselves when we needed it, so I suspect still lack the ability to do it for others
Catherine D.
@Cheryl Rofer: And oxygen concentrators are so much safer than nekkid O2 tanks.
Mary G
Well, I was one of the people yelling at the administration to do something on Twitter and am very pleased that they are. Being a bystander to a situation this tragic is hard. We have been so privileged in being able to help finance the development of vaccines and pay for them.
tom
@JoyceH: PPE is listed in the document embedded in the first tweet from Sabrina Siddiqui.
Cheryl Rofer
@Catherine D.: Good point. There was just a terrible fire in a Baghdad hospital that seems to have been fed by oxygen tanks.
VeniceRiley
Since our agreement with vax manufacturers prohibits distribution of our excess doses off our own territory in many cases, it has me wondering if we can dose from embassy and consulate driveways. I hope we are sending an fton of monoclonal/polyclonal antibodies as well… Lilly and regeneron.
JoyceH
@tom:
Cool. Are the citizens masking up? I see the coverage on the news but it’s mostly overwhelmed hospitals, etc, not a lot of street views, so I can’t tell if the average person has gotten the word about masks and taken it to heart.
tom
@JoyceH: I have no idea if people are masking up or not. I have read that the Modi government has been heavily criticized for holding large rallies that many suspect have turned into superspreader events.
Spanky
You can’t unilaterally fly in tons of relief to a sovereign country without an agreement. I wonder how much of the delay was due to Modi dragging his heels?
StringOnAStick
@Catherine D.: There’s a tweet out there of oxygen tanks laid on their side in the back of a truck, two layers deep and the top mounted regulators not capped off. Maybe that’s how they transport empty ones, but carrying full ones in any way other than secured in an upright position is extremely dangerous. If the regulator on the top of a tank gets knocked off then it becomes a missile capable of killing people, going through walls, etc. as all that compressed gas rapidly escapes. Things are so bad in India right now that I know this seems petty but it’s a very real hazard.
I always cringe when I see an unsecured helium tank while someone fills balloons with it. Just more proof that OSHA has been relegated to barely existing status in the US.
RaflW
@guachi: “At this point, my initial thought is that a sustained coronavirus outbreak is a sign of government failure.” My thought as well.
I have seen quite a bit of criticism of the Modi administration. I think it is both true that rich nations have not done as much as we could/should have up to now in places like India, north & east Africa, and parts of the Americas (Brazil is it’s own special Bolsonaro Basketcase), and that Modi et al. haven’t done nearly all they could internally within India to have contained the virus.
Having huge election rallies, allowing more or less unrestricted mass religious celebrations, as well as keeping up on PPE and hospital capacity.
It is a humanitarian disaster on a huge scale. The most important thing right now is aid, relief, and intervention.
Kay
I’m glad. Is this considered a lot of aid?
I think we should do a lot of aid. People in India need the help and this country needs to do something good after all the nastiness and lack of generosity of the last 4 years.
JoyceH
@tom:
It figures. Thanks to Trump and Bolisaro, I’ve come to equate ‘populist strongman’ with ignorant arrogance on the topic of masks and social distancing.
rk
I have friends and relatives in India. My 3 cousins and their families all have COVID, one of my friend’s entire family has it and her father died two days ago, Another friend’s family, her daughter and son-in law all have it, one friend’s entire building has 70 cases and one man died due to lack of hospital care.
I had a long conversation with my cousin and he told me that when he went to visit our home town, less than 5% of the people were wearing masks. Everyone thought that they had beaten this thing because the politicians (and their own idiocy told them so). The sentiment he heard was that COVID did nothing to them the first time round and there would be no problem the second time. I’ve had other friends tell me for months that a lot of people in India did not care about COVID any more and simply refuse to follow the rules and were becoming very complacent. That and political rallies, huge religious festivals and a fascist right wing thug leader in charge has led to this.
An ugly part of me really wants to say to them that the country voted for this, so they should face the consequences. How can the world deal with this many idiots? Some times people need to be just left to rot. But there are so many good and decent people and innocent by standers and healthcare workers who will bear the consequences as well. You can’t give enough oxygen, or enough supplies to make a difference unless the people change.
cain
Let’s also recognize that Modi a) did not allow pfizer and moderna vaccines b) did not plan adequately when it was clear that it was going to run short c) allowed a major religious ceremony to become a super spreader event.
These are all actions that Modi is responsible for. One of the bits of his agenda is to show that India is can “do it alone” and did not need any support from the outside. But they have unique challenges in scaling and his hubris is what has lead to this mess. He wanted to show Hindu power, and is failing miserably as his policies are primarily killing Hindus.
terry chay
@VeniceRiley: so few dudes from an embassy only reason is for political PR. US doesn’t work that way, leave those token measures to China and Russia whose vaccine “donations” resemble the scale you are taking about.
RaflW
@VeniceRiley: Not surprisingly, Pharma is an ethical trash heap.
cain
@rk:
If you really want to fuck the bakts/hindutva and get them into a moonsoon level rage – just claim that Modi has killed more Hindus than anyone else in the country’s history.
Imagine the utter blind rage.
Catherine D.
@StringOnAStick: Oh, yeah! Cornell put an large O2 tank behind the animal hospitals and laid pipes underground to avoid lots of little O2 tanks in the main buildings.
I work with LN2 all the time. It’s a comfort to know if a tank malfunctions and I can’t get away fast enough, at least I’ll only smother ?
terry chay
@JoyceH: no they aren’t masking up. They arent even social distancing. Imagine if 70% of America were Trumpers instead of 30% and you have India. How do you think it got out of control in the first place?
randy khan
When you look at a graph of the case growth in India (granting that, as others have said, it’s likely that it understates the actual situation), it goes up at a staggering rate. This is how growth curves look for these kinds of diseases, but it also means you can go from “hmm, a bit worrisome” to a full-blown crisis remarkably fast. Even if you saw it coming, the time it takes to make arrangements like these will make it look like you were lollygagging.
Mike in NC
@StringOnAStick: I suspect abolishing OSHA was on the Orange Clown’s 2nd term agenda, along with a host of other terrible moves.
RaflW
@JoyceH: Just look at the GOP in places like Michigan. Balls-out total opposition to mitigation strategies throughout the pandemic.
There is just zero interest in the public good among most right-wingers, worldwide.
Cheryl Rofer
@randy khan: That’s what exponentials do. That’s how the virus has increased in Italy, Brazil, the United States, you name it. The virus doesn’t care about you. It stupidly obeys mathematical laws that we can understand. The disconnect is in our doing what needs to be done.
Annoys the hell out of me.
rikyrah
Please let this help the people of India.
Next up, Brazil. Same situation, but, with 1/5 the population of India. In this hemisphere, they are our dire situation.
Fair Economist
@Cheryl Rofer: All along I’ve been frustrated with the “re-opening” schemes that run on the current rate of cases. Closing and re-opening need to be based on the rate of *change*, not the absolute level. If we’d just adopted the policy of “keep the case rate dropping” we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, plus gained economically from greater stability. But even now, after twice having re-opening lead to disaster, people are pushing to drop restrictions when case levels are roughly flat for a few weeks.
They just won’t learn.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Cheryl Rofer: When my mother was on oxygen at home for several weeks about 10 years ago she had an oxygen machine like that. I was impressed because it was such a simple, elegant idea. When I was a kid my grandmother had oxygen tanks in her bedroom, which made me nervous because they were such an explosive danger. But she also took nitroglycerine for her heart! I was in high school before I learned it is famous primarily as an explosive.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Wag: They are very cool!
cain
@rikyrah: @Cheryl Rofer:
That is why I do not understand why you would want to politicize this virus. Eventually, you’re signing the death warrant for a portion of your own constituency.
With the vaccines out – the people taking them are going to be further protected group than those not vaccinated. Even though we are bending backwards to help them – they are refusing.
What do you do at this point? I don’t know.
In India, they believed in their own superiority – eg the first wave didn’t do much to them… but everyone have always predicted the 2nd wave was going to always be way worse.
Thankfully, my own immediate family have been very careful and nobody has gotten sick.
Ksmiami
@JoyceH: unfortunately a combination of behavioral fatigue (more weddings and festivals etc), hot weather and variants have exploded in India.
ThresherK
Big surprise: Tulsard Gabbi is in the forefront of Do Something Twitter on this. If she knows that there’s more to this than just the large-scale equivalent of maxxing out a credit card and loading up a van at the CVS, it’s news to me.
cain
@ThresherK: We’re talking about two countries – it takes some time to muster organization and try to work together on deciding what is needed. That information is bi-directional.
Ksmiami
@Cheryl Rofer: as I’ve said from the start; this virus doesn’t care about your religion, your politics, your hair color, it’s just hungry to replicate itself and you are a perfect vessel…
Suzanne
The US building code requirements around medical gases are much of why we can’t just turn empty big-box stores into safe hospitals. Also compartmentation in hospitals to protect immobile people from fire.
smedley the uncertain
@Sloane Ranger: Devices that ‘Concentrate” the O2 in room air and deliver it to the patient. My spouse has COPD and needs O2 supplement. We have a fixed and portable version of these devices. They are a life saver. I imagine much bigger ones can supply a lot of much needed Oxygen
Cheryl Rofer
@ThresherK: Gabbard is far from the only one. The discussion is largely fact-free. I got so angry this morning I had to go out and work in the yard. (Although I was planning that anyway.) I don’t usually get angry, but the Dunning-Kruger quotient of this discussion has been appalling.
I wanted to write a great deal more, but I found myself just getting angrier. I have to say that the comments are much better than I was steeling myself for. Jackals are okay.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
This is a good start – but we can and should do more to help. I have confidence in the Biden-Harris admin to do this right. I hope to see even more help for India and for other other countries who need it.
Baud
@Cheryl Rofer:
Just remember, Biden is president because he know how and when to ignore twitter.
Baud
@cain:
More than two. US isn’t the only one helping.
zhena gogolia
@ThresherK:
I see a lot of Russian influence in the twitter discourse (“Russia has always been the real friend to India, not US!”), so that fits with Tulsi.
Jay
It’s a case of both Governmental failure and Public failure.
Here in BC, cases are still exploding, you are not supposed to travel except for “essential” reasons, which most people take to mean wandering around a box store in close proximity to other, for hours because buying a 4” succulent for the kitchen window ledge is essential. They also drag their kids around the store, many unmasked.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
a scan of twitter tells me the US is still weighing sending the AZ stockpile? A lot of confident assertions that this will “never” be used in the US. Anyone know the facts on this?
Ken
Which is why I’m a little torn. Yes, international relations, yes, humanitarian gesture, but the United States isn’t out of the woods yet.
Then again I can see Fox doing a full 180 on this — “why is the US sending medical aid overseas, when its needed for our own out-of-control COVID pandemic?” — which might get a few people to take precautions.
Cheryl Rofer
@Baud: Yes, although I think that ignoring Twitter this time around didn’t help him. The big stumble seems to have been a dismissive comment by Jen Psaki – I recall seeing it and thinking that it wasn’t good but don’t recall what it was. That set some people off.
The lack of any comment after that allowed a bunch of griping to fill the airspace, fueled by searches for scapegoats (Big Pharma! ☠!) and muddled repetition of erroneous claims seen on the internet. All that made its way into a NYT editorial, for one example.
So Blinken, Sullivan, Harris, and others are now tweeting out what they’ve got so far.
I fundamentally agree with Biden that he shouldn’t take Twitter’s advice, and he’s not in this case. The list of what we’re sending to India is exactly what I would recommend and not in line with a number of ill-advised Twitter ideas. But he needs someone monitoring Twitter to raise a red flag at certain times, and this was one of them.
cain
@Baud:
Yes,you’re correct – I think Germany is also involved from what I’ve read. But yes the rest of the world is responding and so logistics is going to have to be worked out.
There was one aspect though that wasn’t discussed and that is the COVID patents that makes it harder to do moderna and pfizer. I hope that they address this.
Starfish
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Because AstraZeneca has not filed any paperwork or gone to any approval process in the US, we can’t use those doses here. I don’t know what the timeline for getting approval would be. With three other vaccines, it may not be profitable for them to navigate the system of getting approval.
cain
@Starfish: there is no point keeping this in the country then. Send it to India and any other place that needs it and help bolster those countries. The faster we can get people vaccinated the better it will be for our mental health and world economy – also staying alive.
Villago Delenda Est
Clearly Modi’s borrowing of the TFG pandemic playbook is turning out exactly as it has in the US and Brazil. A public health disaster to be swept under the rug.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Cheryl Rofer:
I haven’t followed this issue closely, but Ron Klain– or, I suspect, someone who has his log-in– spends enough time on twitter that I’ve seen him criticized for it (should the COS spend so much time on twitter..?). I don’t remember Psaki’s comment. I agree that while twitter, even more-or-less well-intentioned blue-check types who should and do know better, ignore the complex realities of just about everything, it’s a political fact of life, probably forever.
@Starfish: thanks
Suzanne
We haven’t had a music thread in some time.
I’m feeling a bit homesick for the desert.
Father Mountain
Gvg
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: No but I can make some guesses. AZ hasn’t even applied for EUA here. We have so much vaccine that uptake has slowed. Basically we have what we need and I don’t think AZ sees any point in trying to get approved here when others are begging for it. So I think they aren’t going to be approved here, have thought so for some time.
Long term when this is an annual thing to get a seasonal shot, is a different story. That’s when complete comparisons between all of the possible choices will be made. No idea what will happen then.
Gvg
@cain: I don’t think that matters, and both have difficult storage requirements. I think India needs easier vaccines and I also think they make their own, just needed some raw materials. There are actually a lot of different successful vaccines including many we will never see here. Since India was already manufacturing vacccines, I don’t think patents are an issue.
debbie
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yep. His recent political rally turned out to be a superspreader. whocouldanode? ??♀️
gene108
@guachi:
It is due to government failure. The last spike was in September, but the government stepped up and got the spread under control.
Edit: What’s infuriating is India had succeeded in avoiding a catastrophic outbreak like this fir so long. Lockdowns, contact tracing, etc. and in the past month PM Modi’s government had thrown caution to the wind, and now seems to not get the Centre (central government) involved in coordinating between states.
Deccan Herald (English newspaper) YouTube channel . I have found some these videos informative.
schrodingers_cat
@guachi: It is
schrodingers_cat
@Villago Delenda Est: He is worse than the ? ?. I hope that this aid is reaches the Indian citizens and not end up in BJP coffers
Ken
Not exactly. The plant is manufacturing the vaccine for some pharmaceutical company, which has control over how and where it is sold. They can’t just sell it off the loading dock. Well, not legally.
They do have an advantage for patent-jumping, in that they already have facilities for making the vaccine. That tends to be ignored by people saying “just break the patents” — these new mRNA vaccines in particular have some pretty complex processing steps and materials. See Derek Lowe’s blog.
gene108
@cain:
I think the second wave was last September that was brought under control.
Then the central government just shit the bed in the last month.
schrodingers_cat
@debbie: Not just one rally and there was the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar.
Ken
@schrodingers_cat: The graphs are absolutely horrifying, see this twitter thread (from this morning’s update, and thank you again Anne Laurie). The curve almost looks super-exponential in April.
JPL
@Villago Delenda Est: Of course we should help our friends, but supporters of Modi will not learn a valuable lesson.
gene108
@Gvg:
A biotech firm in India developed an its own vaccine, Covaxin.
They don’t have the capacity to meet all demand.
There are are pharma and vaccine manufacturers that have contracts with other companies to make their vaccine, like AstraZeneca.
I’m not sure patents are the issue, but rather a company, like Pfizer, AZ, etc. willing to pay to a manufacturer to churn out more of their vaccine for the Indian market.
schrodingers_cat
@Ken: The real figures are at least 10 times more than the reported #. I have been tweeting about this for at least a week now.
gene108
@Baud:
China’s neighbors also want the USA’s help in containing China.
It’s not a tough sell for the Americans
JPL
@Suzanne: My mother was from the Phoenix area, and after my father died she retired there. Once when visiting her a neighbor mentioned vacationing on the East Coast and missed the colors of the desert. I asked what she meant, and she said you only have green.
schrodingers_cat
@Cheryl Rofer: BJP’s troll factory started the blame shifting game and said jump and the left end of the political horseshoe said how high.
What was it that made you so mad
Cheryl Rofer
@Ken: Here’s a helpful article from Derek Lowe’s blog.
Suzanne
@JPL: The Sonoran desert is nice this time of year. I miss the sunsets. There is just nothing like a low desert sunset.
Bill Arnold
This thread from this morning’s AL COVID-19 post/thread is worth reading:
I’d amend the statements about RW governments failing their COVID-19 response; it’s more populist right wing authoritarian governments.
E.g. Israel has done well in its COVID-19 response relative to most of the rest of the world.
China and Vietnam are strongly authoritarian and they’ve done well. (Corrupt technocrats.)
It’s when the government is led by an arrogant, popular authoritarian who doesn’t understand exponentials and won’t listen to those who do, that an incompetent pandemic response is probable.
Such failures should be a sign to a country’s population that a change in government would be desirable.
J R in WV
My mom had COPD, caused by Phillip-Morris Pall Mall brand ciggs, and had an O2 concentrater in the home. At one point I drive my dad from home in WV back to Houston TX where he was treated for leukemia with a trunk full of O2 cylinders, before concentraters that worked on 12-volt. His COPD was caused by the chemo that saved him from the leukemia. The COPD killed him too, even though he didn’t smoke.
Hospital areas with many patients on high volume oxygen therapy can become highly oxygenated, and anything can cause a fire to erupt almost instantly. Oxygen is really dangerous when it flow freely almost anywhere, and this is why hospitals that have fire break out are so very dangerous, whether in Los Angeles or Tehran.
A pure O2 environment bursting into flames is what killed Grisson and his two fellow astronauts on the pad at Kennedy during a test. They replaced that atmosphere mix with a less flammable one for the real launches.
schrodingers_cat
Check out this link https://twitter.com/ManyWorlds1Cat/status/1386320066011148293?s=19
For a timeline of Modi government’s culpability.
Bill Arnold got there first.
Zinsky
What a dreadful situation in India! Like so much of the world’s misery, an inordinate amount of the COVID nightmare is being visited on the poorest, most impoverished people in the world.
schrodingers_cat
@Bill Arnold: BJP-SANGH idealogues have been writing about culling the herd and the survival of the fittest. They are Nazis, ineptitude is not the only explanation
Ken
@Cheryl Rofer: Thank you, I was hunting for that article to link it, but the edit window closed. I also found his discussion from July of last year of the logistics of getting enough vials. Very much “for want of a horseshoe nail” territory.
Geoduck
Along with all the problems already mentioned, India is a country a third the size of the US, with well over a billion people packed into it. Even the most competent and well-meaning government would be having trouble in this situation.
Cheryl Rofer
@Ken: Yes, the vials are special glass. The New Yorker had a nice photo essay on how they’re made.
People say “we need vaccines,” but they don’t realize what it takes to make and deliver them. It’s a multi-step, multi-player system.
cain
@schrodingers_cat:
That is truly the sign of the great Hindu supremacy that they brag about, am I right? I’m so pleased and proud. /sarcasm
cain
@Geoduck:
Except Modi declared that the virus was a solved problem and they have beaten it – this is in advanced of the election. He wanted to brag about how India did it all by itself with no help. Now he’s fucked himself.
schrodingers_cat
@cain: Their entire ideology is based on self delusional grandeur. They lie to themselves and others. They are inept, evil and cruel. Sadly many Indians have drunk the Kool aid. Did you see the tweets they had Twitter take down because they were critical of the response.
https://twitter.com/ManyWorlds1Cat/status/1386321352353742848?s=19
neldob
We need to help more than just India. South America is brewing disaster too. Why are we not helping our neighbors? I could be sold as stemming immigration or something, but the pandemic needs to be controlled more than some company needs to make $.
Suzanne
@J R in WV:
Fun/absolutely terrifying fact: Large building fires are very rare in American hospitals, due to strict building code and regulatory/accreditor compliance. HOWEV: surgical site fires are still a pretty big problem. That’s when a surgical laser ignites the oxygen the patient is breathing while they’re anesthetized, and lights the patient or medical team (or both) on fire.
Gvg
@cain: Have the elections not happened yet? If so, that would work out well, in a political justice sense, assuming enough people can actually vote without dying for it….oh dear, now I have thought about more ways this can be bad. But this government needs to go, and be discredited.
is there any party better able to manage if they get the chance?
Patricia Kayden
Juice Box
@neldob: The problem has nothing to do with patents. Biologic drug production is complex and hard to scale. Each drug has its own Unique production process and you can’t just take an aspirin factory and repurpose it overnight to make Moderna’s vaccine, for example. It would take months to do that. That’s why Bill Gates started building production facilities for all the candidate vaccines last summer with the knowledge that some wouldn’t be used.
If India had a factory ready to go, they could just turn it on and worry about the legal problems next year, but they don’t have that factory. It takes a whole lot more than just receiving the magic recipe from Pfizer or Moderna. Those companies tried to work with the Modi government last year, but Modi wanted an Indian vaccine.
Modi is trying to blame the US for failing to provide vaccines and reagents for vaccine manufacturing as a way to deflect from his own poor management of the problem. He’s not troubled by the truth.
FelonyGovt
Tanzania is also in deep trouble. Tanzania’s President, a Covid denier, died last month, apparently of Covid. They are reporting zero cases, which obviously is complete nonsense.
My kid cousin lives there with her boyfriend. Her dad has made arrangements for her to fly back to the States next month and get vaccinated, but they can’t get her boyfriend into the US.
schrodingers_cat
@Gvg: The elections are at the state level, 5 states. Modi was reelected for a 5 year term in 2019 so he has three more years to go.
L85NJGT
The mess at Emergent has been a factor – that caused problems for both AZ and J&J. The FDA report read like the issues there may not be addressable due to inadequate facilities. Merck is standing up a J&J finishing line, but that won’t be until September.
cain
@FelonyGovt:
A fitting end for a dumb ass. Maybe his replacement will be more wise.