NEW: a deep-dive into the situation in India, where a devastating second wave is overwhelming hospitals and crematoriums, eclipsing global records as it goes ft.com/content/683914…
250,000 new cases every day, and test positivity is soaring suggesting many are still missed
To put this into a global context, much has been made of the resurgences in Europe and North America over recent weeks, but India’s wave has accelerated straight past all of them.
The situation there really is beyond what we’re seeing anywhere else worldwide.
In many parts of the country including the capital Delhi, cases are doubling every five days. Compared to the steady rise seen in the first wave last year, the current climbs are almost vertical.
And in many places, test positivity is rising at the same pace. Even as more and more tests are done, the share of them that come back positive is still climbing, suggesting tens of thousands of cases are going undetected.
All of this is feeding through into a crisis in hospitals beyond what we’ve seen anywhere else in the world over the whole pandemic.
ICUs are twice as full in Nagpur as they ever got in Lombardy last March. Mumbai’s ICU’s are more full than Liège was in Belgium’s brutal peak.
The stories on the ground are grim.
Authorities have taken emergency measures, requiring than any and all oxygen produced anywhere in the state be sent to hospitals as supplies run out.
With thousands simply unable to find a hospital bed, death tolls are mounting at a similarly rapid pace.
But a look at this chart shows another issue: although official Covid death counts are rising, the numbers themselves remain incredibly low.
And I stress in-*credible*
Essentially, none of those numbers are correct; all are vast undercounts.
I collated local news reports (HT @muradbanaji) across seven districts, finding that overall, numbers of Covid victims who have been cremated are 10x larger than official Covid death counts in same areas.
If applied nationally, that would mean that instead of 1,700 deaths per day, India is currently seeing 17,000.
And as more reports come in, that undercounting estimate has been rising, so the true toll may be higher still.
For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.
By ceding the topic of family and children to the right, progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world.
There’s something of a paradox at play here.
On the one hand, pro-natalism often implies constraining individual liberty and setting back women’s progress. As such, the left’s aversion to worrying about birth rates is perfectly natural.
But: the consequence of this emerging ideological slant in birth rates is that each successive generation gets nudged rightwards, increasing the likelihood that conservative politicians (who want to constrain individual liberty and set back women’s progress) get elected.
NEW: Is the internet changing our personalities for the worse?
Conscientiousness and extroversion are down, neuroticism up, with young adults leading the charge.
This is a really consequential shift, and there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into the weeds 🧵
First up, personality analysis can feel vague, and you might well ask why it even matters?
On the first of those, the finding of distinct personality traits is robust. This field of research has been around for decades and holds up pretty well, even across cultures.
On the second, studies consistently find personality shapes life outcomes.
In fact, personality traits — esp conscientiousness and neuroticism — are stronger predictors of career success, divorce and mortality than someone’s socio-economic background or cognitive abilities.
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment.
I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged:
Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay.
In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium.
Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.
What’s going on?
At first glance, this looks like a case of the growing masses of male computer science graduates being uniquely exposed to the rapid adoption of generative AI in the tech sector, and finding jobs harder to come by than earlier cohorts.
The number of people travelling from Europe to the US in recent weeks has plummeted by as much as 35%, as travellers have cancelled plans in response to Trump’s policies and rhetoric, and horror stories from the border.
Denmark saw one of the steepest declines, in an indication that anger over Trump’s hostility towards Greenland may be contributing to the steep drop-off in visitor numbers.
Corporate quotes are usually pretty dry, but the co-founder of major travel website Kayak wasn’t mincing his words: