Updates
1. 24 April 2. 25 April 3. 26 April23 April, Friday, 9AM PST
My mom has died because of the coronavirus. I do not know what to do next. I want to fly back to Delhi, but everyone is asking me to think about my newborn and what will happen if I also get infected. I am afraid of the virus. There is no space in hospitals. I have got one dose of Pfizer. I failed my parents. She was with me in Seattle till 24Mar, just one month ago. She came on 26Dec and she made lots of sweaters for her grand-daughter. And we went for long walks together, to the beach, to the zoo, to sunset hill park. She did yoga everyday and I loved how happy she was. I failed my parents because I didn't get them vaccinated in US. I thought it's not a big deal, the Indian vaccine is not inferior to US. My parents got the first dose on 2 April. The Indian vaccine is useless. (see E1) I thought that there is no need to hurry, we don't know what side-effects the MRNA vaccine has. No need to rush . I was lazy and now I am guilty. I feel like I killed her. I can't fly back to India and now I don't know what to do for the next 4.5hr before my father wakes up and I have to tell him the news. My father is alone now. He spent 16hr on Monday to get mom admitted into a hospital. He struggled from 4am to 8pm and he did it, and then he developed a fever and now he is taking Ivermectin, Azythromycin, and Doxycyclin, and steam.
I have a phd, my sister is a medical doctor, my Dad was a professor in DU, and with all our brains we were stupid. My mom got sick on 12 April, she had diarrhea, and fever and she said that its just a reaction to the first dose of the vaccine and we believed that. I didn't use my brain, I didn't challenge her enough. I didn't ask her to take this more seriously and I am stupid, my mom is dead and I am guilty. I don't want to die but I wish someone will kill me. We should have force fed her Iver, Azy, Doxy, without worrying about side-effects. We did not take the right decisions, and we were too slow, and we were stupid.
Edits
E1: 26 April. I do not know how useful the covishield and covaccine are. They may be very good vaccine chemicals. I do not know whether they are being stored, distributed, and administered properly. I do not know if people are being given the proper advice. I do not want to disrespect the people who worked hard to make this. But clearly the promise of "take the vaccine and you will be safe." is overblown and overhyped. If the vaccine comes with a caveat of "practice strict social distancing for 2 weeks" then that needs to be advertised. A vaccine is the chemical and the standard operating procedure surrounding it. Clearly the vaccine (the SOP and the chemical) are not preventing the infections. The other frustration was with the advertised claim of 0.04% efficacy which is wrong by an order of magnitude. I know of less than a 1000 people and I know of at least 9 positive cases. Two of them contracted the disease after the second dose. These numbers dont add up. So I was equating vaccine to the public awareness drive, the supply chain, the chemical, all of those things. Just injecting the chemical is clearly not sufficient, we need the right quality for everything else as well. I should have said the "indian vaccination drive" is useless, not the vaccine chemical necessarily, but the associated systems. Thanks to this feedback.24 April, Saturday, 9AM PST
I am angry. I am angry at the lies, the theft, the fake data. We couldn't get her phone back from the hospital. I couldn't be found at the DRDO hospital. She took so many photos with her grand-daughter, which she didn't get a chance to upload. We have lost all of them. I hate people who either stole a dead person's phone or simply misplaced her belongings. Now papa will start the process of getting her death certificate, to shut down her bank account, her insurance, her phone numbers. I hate the future, because I know that the government dept which issues death certificates will have huge delays and they will justify the delays saying that too many people have died. It's not their fault and they can't do anything about it. They can not anticipate the lakhs of death certificates that they will have to make based on the 24 hour news broadcast 7 days a week, and they can't scale their operations. Everyone must wait.
There was a fire at a hospital in Mumbai. 13 people died. There was an oxygen leak at a hospital in Nasik. >10 people died. The sheer incompetence is a nail in my head. But now I do see the pain behind these numbers. These are numbers which are still raw. The doctors and the hospitals and the fingers and the arms of our system. They work. They produce numbers which are trust-worthy. The public health administration is the brain and the brain has chosen to lie. The brain chose alternative facts. The public health admin is lying to people. The health minister released a report claiming less than 4 out of 10K people get infected after their first dose of the vaccine. That's a lie. They are either lying, or they are sloppy. I know of more than 7 people who got infected, from independent families. People who did not meet each other, and did not sample 20K people to find these 7. The positive rate in Delhi is 33%. The majority of people who got vaccinated are in big cities like Delhi.
I am in Seattle. The governor here rolled back the restaurant occupancy rate to 25% from 50% because of a small increase in positivity. A simple Proportional-Derivative control. Infection rate goes up, restrictions go up. I never heard of a single warning from the government before the calamity. We were sleeping on the wheel. Just like the captain who ran Titanic full steam into an iceberg, our government has run our country full steam into this disaster.
25 April, Sunday, 10PM PST
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These are the prototypical stages of grieving. I bargained yesterday. I went to a temple to find a priest who can conduct an online service for my mother. On the way there, I told my Uber driver about my mom's death. And he shared with me that lost his mom to stomach cancer two years ago. On the way back home, I again shared my mom's death with the Uber driver. He showed me the photo of his 6mo old boy who died last year. His son was born with immune deficiency and he died because the bone-marrow transplant didn't work out. The marrow was rejected. He told me that photos that cause him the most pain are the photos where his son has a big smile. I have a lot of photos of my mom - holding my daughter in her arm - with the biggest smile on her face and they are unbearable to see, and I keep scrolling through them. Sharing my suffering with strangers who had suffered equally calmed me down. I didn't find what I was looking for at the temple but the Uber rides were therapy so I got more than my money's worth.
I will not move to depression, neither will I just accept this as fate. I want to analyze, and I want to lay down the rules for analysis. Presenting the analysis of a catastrophe is difficult because:
- Readers quickly become defensive and emotionally invested in "defending" the accused. The reader becomes the apologist for whichever cult leader he/she follows, or the reader is enraged if a cult that he/she hates is assigned credit.
- Readers either want a simplistic explanation, or they attack the analysis for being too simplistic, or for being incomplete. For a catastrophe of this scale, it is not possible to present the complete picture while keeping the analysis short enough what people can read it. However, even incomplete analysis can be useful. And hopefully the points below will be useful.
To avoid these pitfalls, I will only present what has happened. So here is what has know to be true
As of 25 April, COVID is an uncontrollable chain reaction at least in Delhi.
Note that this does not blame the delhi government. This does not blame the central government. This also does not absolve them. It's important to disassociate what happened from what caused it. I was born in Delhi, I was raised in Delhi. My relatives are friends live here. I am interested in Delhi. I just have the data for Delhi. Delhi may truly be the worst state as of 25 April, and the cause may be systematic, or stochastic, it may be the harbinger of worse things to come is other cities and states. This statement is not assigning a root cause.
Is this true? The test positivity rate in delhi ≈30±5% . This means that in a family of 3 or 4 there is a high chance that one of those people is infected , or if a person meets more than 3 people from outside his/her family then there is a high chance that one of those people was infected, which means it's only a matter of time before everyone gets infected.
There was no unequivocal warning about coronavirus or mitgation before it became uncontrolled.
Again note that this statement does not assign blame. Not yet. I simply do not know how many people were supposed to do this job, and how many of them failed to do their job. Maybe the health ministry was asleep, or the central cabinet overrode their objections, or the states didn't listen or all of the above, or non of the above and something else entirely. Almost certainly there were multiple points of failure, there were probably multiple mechanisms which were supposed to be independent, but which became highly correlated. I do not know who is responsible for this lack of warning.
Is this true? My mother went back to India on 24 March and she religiously followed the aarogya setu app. She was proud of it. She did not get any warning from aarogya setu. She kept on thinking that the cases in India are "under control". I also looked at the front page of hindustantimes starting from Sunday 21 March. I wanted to go to 18 April but I broke down at 24 Mar and I could not continue. 21 Mar starts with a full front page advertisement of Kumbh Mega-Festival with the portraits of Tirath Singh Rawat (BJP, CM, Uttarakhand) on the left, and Narendra Modi on the right. They are assuring all the devotees who will attend the mega festival that "all medical facilities [are] being arranged" and that the "arrangement of clean drinking water" is complete. On 22 March, the front page warns us that the fresh surge is taking COVID cases past 345,000 but the numbers are presented like the stock index. It's a number devoid of urgency and without any accompanying restrictions. No action is announced on the front page. Similar warning features prominently on BBC on 22 March. On the same date, the Central Government (BJP) is warning the Uttarakhand Government (BJP). The leadership is conveniently federal and schizophreniac on 22 Mar. This is a simple tactic used for blame avoidance. For example, if I direct you to do something, and in the same breath I warn you of the bad effects of that action then if things go bad I have plausible deniability. Its like an implicit consent form. On 23 Mar, the front page news is that the government has decided to increase the gap between two vaccine doses, and the holi celebrations have started. On the bottom of the front page there is a chilling photo of the Kumbh Mela, and again a mention of a public debate between two departments of the same party which is all rhetoric. On 24 March, there is no mention of Covid at all on teh front page. Election campaigning for West Bengal has started, the left column is covered with that and the right column talks about the importance of language and religion in Assam election. At this point I broke down crying.
A number of people in India prefer to remain ignorant and to hide the truth.
Note that this does not absolve our leaders. This does explain some of their actions, given that the percentage of such people is high enough. True leadership is to lead people to do the right thing but which is unpopular. So its important for leaders to be right a lot. True leadership does not waver in taking tough decisions that may make them unpopular. But if enough people want to delude themself then a demagogue will come to power by selling them that dream.
How do I know that a number of people in India prefer to remain ignorant? I must admit I do not have statistics. This is a hard thing to measure. I only have anecdotes. Here is one: Following is a quote from a senior from college. He is angry that the Delhi CM is publicly pleasing for help instead of maintaining a facade of dignity. The facade is more important than the structure underneath for him.
