19/4/21: COVID19: BRIICS

BRIICS are now in a fully-developed Wave 4 of the pandemic, like much of the rest of the world. This is confirmed across both new case numbers and weekly deaths counts:

I highlighted in the table below two BRIICS countries with seriously questionable data quality: China and India. China has been routinely reporting numbers that simply are out of line with anything reported by other countries around the world. India's death statistics appear to be similarly out line with experience in most countries. In the past, Russia received a lot of criticism for its reporting of Covid19 deaths, but their numbers do not appear to be out of line with other countries reported statistics.

These are six largest emerging and middle income economies in the world, and their pandemic dynamics, in the end, hold the key to the global efforts on combating the spread of the disease. Not surprisingly, these countries account for three of the four main variants of the disease to-date. If anyone thinks that Europe and North America can effectively insulate themselves from what is happening in these countries, by any means other than attaining a sufficient and robust immunity through vaccinations, they really need to reflect hard on their rational thought capacity.