Dear all. Thanks for all the feedback (on and off twitter).
To reiterate somethings. As mentioned in the article, every life lost is too many, and we must hold the central (and state) governments responsible for any lapses shown. I share the grief and shock of those who have...
..lost their lives. I have been myself been on twitter helping wherever possible help people find oxygen, beds, ICU via Apps or other volunteers kind enough to help. I have friends who have lost near and dear ones. I know the situation is very heart breaking. I share your...
...sorrow. As I clearly mentioned in the article, having religious and election gatherings during a pandemic may have contributed too to the Covid surge. I wrote the article to counter some lazy thinking and oversimplifications being propagated. A wrong message was being given...
...given that India's response to Covid was wrong from the beginning and based on that another narrative was built that since the response to first phase was wrong, the destruction of the second phase was a forgone conclusion. This is factually incorrect. India's response to...
...first phase was much better then the global average and was endorsed by none other than Bill Gates (among others). We started off with a very ambitious vaccine program. However as cases began to subside, and the second wave started to hit different parts of the world...
...at different periods in time and with different intensity, at a crucial period India's cases started to go down dramatically. Given these conditions, there were less incentives ( and the pressure of economy) for more stricter controls and there were hints from scientific...
..community that the virus was so widespread in India anyway due to its high population density, the government seems to have gone into a false sense of security. At same time there were no 'credible' pointers of the emergence of deadly new strains in India spreading ( our...
...genome sequencing has been weak traditionally). Though the opposition and some media commentators are now attacking the government in showing laxity, in the absence of any concrete pointers, government would not have been able to build a consensus on a lockdown. The same....
...lack of any credible pointers led the state to believe (suing the last wave as reference) that there may not be be such an exceptional demand of oxygen even if there was one more wave. As usual sure one can rightly argue that the feedback loop between those who were...
...monitoring the data and feeding it to the decision makers to make decision on was weak, but that is a general gap in our governance model and we surely to ask questions there. But again since there was no precedent for such a thing, the people who were in-charge of...
...evaluating this data did not know how to draw predictive inferences into the future from this data. One can argue on both sides that we should have had such a team in place, but we have lots of historical weaknesses in our governance processes, which is unrealistic to...
...expect that these would have magically get fixed in a short period where the cases started go from low to very high ( 3 weeks or more). One thing is clear, from all this we can surely say there was a case of improving processes on the fly, but there is no convincing case...
...at all that there was a clear data set based on which one could unambiguously plan ahead. So the premise that government's Covid policy was bad from the start and hence the reason why we were unprepared for the severe second wave is not correct. But this myth was being...
...repeatedly being pushed like in an echo chamber. I felt compelled to call this out as it prevents a debate on the actual deep systematic governance gap which though not the creation of the current government, but it should have more aggressively tries to address it. Plus...
...many commentators surely were not interested in restricting the debate to pandemic management, but mixing it with India's secular versus Hindu Renaissance / Hindutva debate - latter is a valid debate and needs to be held its proper time. But by mixing the Pandemic...
...management debate with other topics, this just polarises the debate and prevents different groups working together to face the deadly second wave. This was done deliberately by some commentators to draw political mileage out of a tragedy which would have made handling of...
...the crisis even more difficult. I found it important enough to call out some of these commentators for their lazy thinking (charitably) and opportunism to mix unrelated issues to exploit a tragedy. 🙏
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Covid second wave India: There is a common misconception (globally) and india that inside the home you are magically safe. Yes if you are the only person in that house and cut off from the world. Being in a closed apartment with an infected person actually increases your...
...chances of infection. So you need put it in context. Ideally wherever governments / people can afford it, Covid patients(even mild ones) should be isolated away from families till they recover. The chances increase dramatically if one is sharing an apartment / house with...
...a Covid positive patient no matter how careful you are ( and the more contagious variant transmits more quickly). The least you should do is ventilate your house as much as possible keeping windows open ( including patient room) and really break air contact as far as...
Covid India 2nd Wave: While I fully agree we must hold the government accountable (later, for now unity), but the more I read, the more I think about it, I am convinced that those claiming with certainty that severity of second wave was predictable are either plain wrong or...
...have an axe to grind. Fact is pandemics and microbes have their own dynamics which interplay with genetics, age profiles, nutritional levels, climate, fitness of populations, population density and country’s health infrastructure. Since there are so many variables which...
...can affect, all models, statistics and inference should be interpreted with caution as none of the models can into consideration all these factors. If we forget the availability of Oxygen issue, but we simply do not know why Germany or Belgium did not have the same deadly...
The severe unexpected second Covid In India has proven that 1) pandemics can overwhelm in any system in any country no matter how rich. 2) However the lower your people to hospital ratio, the more severely it will affect you. 3) Though India's health infrastructure and...
...governance have improved, India's governance is still low by global standards. 4) And the current ruling party could not demonstrate any visible difference than it predecessors ( nor has opposition Congress given any convincing argument, it had better plans). 5) Health care...
...and other services in India still carry a tag of elitism and often if and what quality of service depends on what kind of 'special' contacts you have - the poor are still left to fend on their own. 6)The concept of scientific temper and basing decisions on data is not yet...
Unpredictable severe Covid second wave in India: Lessons learned a thread: Have been reading up on this - tried to restrict to unbiased opinions - excluded professional complainers and those who have an axe to grind. Here is what I learnt for whatever it is worth. First of all...
...as I have argued elsewhere I do not agree with the simplistic analysis, that the severity of second wave was predictable. Now over to the lessons learned and what would have been done better. One: We could have better monitored the so called R of Covid ( reproduction rate)...
...in each district, state and nationwide and pro-actively tune our Covid policy based on that - there seems to have been let down of guard here. This is a global best practice. Second: We were not as good we should have been in genomic sequencing of new mutations of virus, a...
...There are some lessons to be learnt from this. Article quote: "we learnt that one of my colleagues had been running a fever for almost four days and Joyeeta and I had encountered him in my office". So the most common mode of transmission is closed spaces and unventilated...
...rooms, this needs to be more broadly addressed. Also quarantining covid positive patients at home is not ideal, in best case quarantine them in special places where they cannot infect family till they recover. The other lesson is unless you are a rich country and will to...
The controversial oxygen debate on Covid India: A thread. Though I live outside India, I have family in India and am writing this as people are losing loved ones and are genuinely outraged. Yet we must go by facts though when we lose our loved ones it is natural to be...
...emotional. While there are some who point to data that worrying signs were already showing up in Feb /March and government should have picked up signals should surely be listened to and lessons learned, it was far from black and white. With India's economy battered, the...
...government had to a balancing act between building business confidence and putting more restrictions and where to do spend resources on. Plus unlike other nations , India was not hit by a second wave in November to Dec and some policy makers relied perhaps too much on their...