The Politics behind Covid-19

By AKP

Why second coronavirus wave is devastating?

The rise in case numbers has been exponential in the second wave.

On 18 June last year, India recorded 11,000 cases and in the next 60 days, it added 35,000 new cases on average every day. On 10 February, at the start of the second wave, India confirmed 11,000 cases - and in the next 50 days, the daily average was around 22,000 cases. But in the following 10 days, cases rose sharply with the daily average reaching 89,800. India has been consistently reporting more than 150,000 cases for days now. It reported 273,810 cases on Monday - the biggest daily spike since the pandemic began. Badly-affected cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Ahmedabad have almost run out of hospital beds. India on 25 March announced that a new variant of the coronavirus had been detected from samples collected from different states. Virologist Shahid Jameel explained that a "double mutation in key areas of the virus's spike protein may make the virus more infectious and allow it to escape the immune system".

Reason behind the intensified spread of COVID-19

Assembly elections were held in the states of Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal and the union territory of Puducherry in March and April. Of these, West Bengal went through an excruciatingly long eight-phase election between March 27 and April 29, a period when daily new cases in the state went up from around 800 to more than 17,000 now. An analysis this week by Associate Professor Deepankar Basu, in the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, showed that the five regions with elections reported a much higher rate of increase in infections than those without. Dates for the elections were announced by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Feb 26, as the number of daily cases was beginning to go up. Political parties, however, paid little heed to this warning sign and organised many large rallies with minimal social distancing and very little mask-wearing. Leaders from different parties, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, were seen at these rallies without masks. In early April, Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma, a top leader from the Bharatiya Janata Party in Assam and also its health minister, had even said that masking was not necessary because Covid-19 was "not present" in Assam.

Role of Maha Kumbh Mela

The precise role of the Hindu religious festival the Kumbh Mela in India’s raging outbreak is impossible to know in the absence of contact tracing. But the event was one source of infections as cases skyrocketed, according to local officials, religious leaders and media reports.More than 414,000 new cases were reported in India on Friday, a global record. About 4,000 people are dying a day, but such figures are an undercount. The combination of an enormous wave of coronavirus cases and one of the biggest mass gatherings on the planet has fueled criticism that India’s government should have curtailed the religious event or canceled it altogether. Last year, when India had just several hundred coronavirus cases, the government swiftly imposed a nationwide lockdown.

The Kumbh Mela “may end up being the biggest superspreader in the history of this pandemic,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University

Underreporting

To begin with, the under-reported death figures aren’t part of some grand global conspiracy. This has been happening and will continue to happen across the globe. For example, New York was accused of under-reporting its nursing home deaths by a few thousand that were added to the tally in early February 2021. This pushed their total nursing home resident deaths up from 8,500 to nearly 15,000. So, if one digs deeper for such stories in India, they will find that state governments are underreporting deaths.

Research on the behavioural dynamics of COVID-19 from a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates the global under-reporting factor for cumulative cases around 7 and for deaths 1.4 as of December, 2020. Researchers further note that these factors vary substantially across nations. In India, this problem seems to be particularly acute during the second wave based on empirical evidence and epidemiological models. The country is reeling from skyrocketing infection and death counts. This surge has thrown our health-care systems off balance. Crucial medical supplies run dangerously low and hospitals are forced to turn away patients. These forecasting models are used to predict the need for oxygen, hospital beds, intensive care unit care needs, the peak and duration of the pandemic. Without having more informative data, accurate projections are impossible. Knowing the truth is better for both public and policymakers to gauge the true state of the pandemic.