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.
Some people have responded to that chart with "That can’t be right", or "We can’t be worse than America".
I’m afraid the chart is right. 15 years ago the UK’s record on homelessness *was* not too dissimilar to other developed countries, but things have rapidly deteriorated.
There has long been a gap between people’s views of crime locally (not a big issue) vs nationally (it’s terrible out there!), but there are signs this is now happening to economic perceptions too.
My finances? Going okay. The economy? Awful.
What’s going on?
My column this week asks whether the media (both mainstream and social) and its incentives to maximise engagement could be playing a key role ft.com/content/8cd76c…
With crime, it’s widely accepted that the main reason for this decoupling is media coverage.
People’s sense of crime levels is based mainly on what they see on TV and read in newspapers, and much less on what they or the people they know actually experience.
NEW: my column this week is about the coming vibe shift, from Boomers vs Millennials to huge wealth inequality *between* Millennials.
Current discourse centres on how the average Millennial is worse-off than the average Boomer was, but the richest millennials are loaded 💸🚀
That data was for the UK, but it’s a similar story in the US. The gap between the richest and poorest Millennials is far wider than it was for Boomers. More debt at the bottom, and much more wealth at the top.
In both countries, inequality is overwhelmingly *within* generations, not between them.
And how have the richest millennials got so rich?
Mainly this: enormous wealth transfers from their parents, typically to help with buying their first home.
In the UK, among those who get parental help, the top 10% got *£170,000* towards their house (the average Millennial got zero).
American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.
I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood.
Last week, an NYT poll showed Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.
Averaging all recent polls (thnx @admcrlsn), the Democrats are losing more ground with non-white voters than any other demographic.
People often respond to these figures with accusations of polling error, but this isn’t just one rogue result.
High quality, long-running surveys like this from Gallup have been showing a steepening decline in Black and Latino voters identifying as Democrats for several years.
The politics of America’s housing issues in one chart:
• People and politicians in blue states say they care deeply about the housing crisis and homelessness but keep blocking housing so both get worse
• Red states simply permit loads of new homes and have no housing crisis
And if you were wondering where London fits into this...
It builds even less than San Francisco, and its house prices have risen even faster.
That cities like London & SF (and the people who run them) are considered progressive while overseeing these situations is ... something
Those charts are from my latest column, in which I argue that we need to stop talking about the housing crisis, and start talking about the planning/permitting crisis, because it’s all downstream from that ft.com/content/de34df…
NEW: we often talk about an age divide in politics, with young people much less conservative than the old.
But this is much more a British phenomenon than a global one.
40% of young Americans voted Trump in 2020. But only 10% of UK under-30s support the Conservatives. Why?
One factor is that another narrative often framed as universal turns out to be much worse in the UK: the sense that young generations are getting screwed.
Young people are struggling to get onto the housing ladder in many countries, but the crisis is especially deep in Britain:
It’s a similar story for incomes, where Millennials in the UK have not made any progress on Gen X, while young Americans are soaring to record highs.
Young Brits have had a much more visceral experience of failing to make economic progress.