India’s Covid Cases Worsen With Masks

India has been in the past touted as a beacon of what every country should emanate for covid restrictions and mask-wearing. I took a nice review article from Daniel Horowitz at the Blaze as an outline to show in-depth more of the covid case messaging of India’s Covid pandemic.

First India was a Magical place.

One of the main reasons, Indian health officials say, is that the country has managed to encourage and enforce almost universal acceptance of masks without much debate.

From the moment the pandemic landed in this South Asian nation, politicians and health experts have been united about the importance of masks, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“Until you have a vaccine, you have a social vaccine, and the social vaccine is the mask,” said Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, pointing to his mask and repeating the mantra he uses in speeches addressing the nation.

Indians have embraced masks thanks to a combination of factors, including a healthy fear of the virus among the public, a unified voice from authorities, billions of automated phone messages and hundreds of thousands of masking-violation tickets.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people are wearing them,”…

What is it about the number of CASES?

Physicians should not treat numbers. That is medical school rotations 101. We treat people. A few interesting facts about India. An article from NPR supports that overall, India is a younger country than others. Only about 6% of the population in India is over the age of 65. The population of those younger than 14 is shrinking. Therefore, the deaths are in a population shifted younger a bit versus the United States. The youth still are mostly immune. Under 25 make up more than 50% of the population. But the vulnerable start at a younger age. With co-morbidities, that age is 50 in the US, but in India, that may be 44. No one is answering this. More air pollution in India, vitamin D deficiency, etc?

From Business Today,

People aged 45 and above account for about 88 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths in India making them the most vulnerable section, the Union Health Ministry said on Wednesday, a day after the government opened up vaccinations for all those in the age bracket from April 1.

Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan said 20 states and union territories, … have administered the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine to more than 92 per cent of healthcare workers

From The Telegraph India,

…over half of the country’s Covid-19 deaths have occurred among patients 60 years or older, the Union health ministry said on Thursday, releasing updated figures.

Around 73 per cent (2,508) of the Covid-19 deaths have occurred among patients with underlying health disorders, the ministry said.

The ministry said 0.5 per cent of Covid-19 deaths have occurred in patients below 15 years, 2.5 per cent in the 15-30 age group, 11.4 per cent in the 30-45 age group, 35.1 per cent in the 45-60 age group and 50.5 per cent among patients 60 years or older.

Then the mitigation efforts started to unravel.

The numbers are climbing in India even after all the mitigation efforts including strict mask mandates which have been enforced. The New York Times has joined the Panic Porn of Covid. As seen below, no journalist asks the question, ‘who is getting sick enough from covid to die and why?

Discussion

Covid is a virus. Mitigation is going to slow it down, but not stop it. If you are not fully immune to it you are a host and at risk, but only depending on certain variables tells how much at risk.

That is why lockdowns are seen now as illogical. India is showing us the illogic of masks as any kind of public mitigation strategy. The vulnerable are dying because no personal protection plan has been put in place and recommended. Vaccination for the vulnerable can help reduce the hospitalization and death rate, but not if you administer 37% of your vaccinations (as shown above in graft) to the healthiest population as seen in India (18-44-year-olds). No one is looking at the population of India to understand why there is a bit shift in the vulnerable age more toward the ’40s. They are playing the normal messaging of the “cases, cases, cases” game.

Postscript

Two Mask supporting studies are mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article.

Studies everyone should memorize as already proven false because these keep getting reused. From the Wall Street Journal article:

1) The Germany Mask Model:

This study is a model from April 2020 data. It was submitted for review in July 2020. When the narrative of masking needed help, the article was approved in November and published on December 22, 2020. This is 8 months late in data and interpretation for masks. “Weighing various estimates, we conclude that 20 d after becoming mandatory face masks have reduced the number of new infections by around 45%.” This is poor science! Review below:

2) Anything Covid from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

This is a modeling catastrophe. This department has routinely been modeling the masks can work and life can be saved if just 95% of people wear them. They were originally called out for flawed methods. From Stat Online, April 2020:

“It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited” to projecting Covid-19 deaths, epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told reporters this week, referring to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

In the October issue of Nature Medicine, another model published looking at United States Data from February 2020 to September 2020.

Universal mask use could save an additional 129,574 (85,284–170,867) lives from September 22, 2020 through the end of February 2021, or an additional 95,814 (60,731–133,077) lives assuming a lesser adoption of mask wearing (85%), when compared to the reference scenario.

And then India.

Again, about India from the Wall Street Journal about success of masking in December 2020;

“Wearing a mask is a must—not just for everyone’s safety, but also for job security,” [a worker reported} “No mask means no job.”

Mask police officer Mr. Patel spends hours without finding anyone not wearing a mask these days. Just a few months ago, he would hand out 50 tickets in an afternoon.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people are wearing them,” he said.

Though it is a preprint, a study out of University of Louisville College of Arts and Sciences using the data from The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine and CDC shows:

Our main finding is that mask mandates and use are not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 spread among US states. 80% of US states mandated masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mandates induced greater mask compliance but did not predict lower growth rates when community spread was low (minima) or high (maxima).