Thread by @agrawalmanindra

This article appeared today in Print: theprint.in/health/india-i…. The reporter had called me in the afternoon and asked some questions about our model. I explained to her the conclusions including the fact that a large number of infected people in India showed few symptoms. 1/n

To highlight this point, I mentioned that, according to our model, only one in 90 cases have been reported. And the unreported ones are primarily due to being asymptomatic. However, this ratio is not uniform across regions. 2/n

In Delhi it is around 1:25 while in UP/Bihar it climbs up to around 1:300. Unfortunately, the report has spun this in a different direction. The unreported cases become "missing ones". The implication being that our system has somehow goofed up by not detecting them. 3 /n

Nowhere in the report is the original point made that the virus seems to be affecting India less severely than many other countries (multiple reasons for this have been speculated). Anyway, that is what is reporting these days. I will be more careful with reporters in future. 4/n

For those interested, we have not done any survey for our results. They are purely based on a mathematical model run on publicly available data. Although the model has been predicting the trajectory for the pandemic very well for past 3-4 months, it is still only a model. 5/n

And conclusions of a model cannot be validated without cross checking it with actual data. One aspect of our model has been verified: its conclusions for pandemic trajectory have been confirmed by actual progression. 6/n

The other aspect, projection of total infections, can only be verified by sero-survey data. However, there have been few surveys, and even for the few that have taken place, there are doubts about the methodology adopted. So these conclusions remain unverified. 7/7

I also talked to ToI reporter and shared the same info. See this report: timesnownews.com/amp/india/arti… and contrast with the Print one. 🤦‍♂️

*correction: I talked to Amitabh Sinha of Indian Express whose report is quoted in ToI.