JOIN USCovid-19 crisis | We have sort of reached a plateau, but it's a high plateau... have to be very, very careful: Dr Shahid Jameel
Eminent virologist Dr Shahid Jameel recently resigned as the chairman of the Indian SARS-COV-2 Genomics Consortia (Insacog), days after criticising the government for the way it was managing the Covid-19 pandemic. In a conversation with The Indian Express, he spoke about what was going wrong with India’s Covid-19 death count and how Indian leaders' complacency after the first wave led to the more devastating second wave.
Dr Jameel mentioned that the annual mortality rate of India for 2019 was 7.3 per 1,000 per year. “If you convert that into deaths per day, it turns out to 27,600 deaths per day. Now let’s say we have 4,000 deaths per day because of Covid. This number, 4,000, is only a 15% increase over the natural deaths happening. Now, with that small a difference, you would not even notice it at crematorium grounds, at burial grounds. But what you are seeing is a completely different picture,” he told the publication.
The scenes emerging from crematorium grounds around the country are heartbreaking -- people having to wait in serpentine queues to bury or cremate loved ones; ambulances and cremation ground workers charging exorbitant amounts of money from bereaved families. Several bodies were even found dumped in rivers in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar districts.
Undercounting of deaths
“There is maybe around 5-10 times undercounting of deaths. And that is happening because even in the best of times, deaths are not registered very well in the country and our registry is weak. But also when the healthcare system gets overwhelmed, people are unable to get a Covid-positive test. There are going to be thousands of cases where tests don’t come in, you don’t count as Covid-19 positive. Even if somebody who is Covid-positive dies of a heart attack, it would be called a cardiac arrest death rather than a Covid death,” Dr Jameel said.
"Certainly the numbers tell us that we had a really devastating April-May. Although the curve seems to have flattened out, do realise that it has flattened out at a very high plateau. While it is showing some signs of coming down, I think it is a little too early to say much. I’ll remind everyone that it is a high plateau and we have to be very, very careful not to let it go any further but to bend it down," he further added.
Complacency cost India
The deadly second wave came to India because of the negligence of the government, according to Dr Jameel. After the first wave, when cases started to reduce between September and February, festivals were celebrated in mass gatherings and even the Bihar election took place. All this, despite the fact that every single country that peaked before us got a second wave -- we ignored that.
“All through that time, as the graph was going down, we and our leaders started thinking that we have conquered Covid,” he said.
“Let me just say that first, we became complacent, and then this sort of variant virus caught us at the right time for the virus, the wrong time for us. Finally, when we had the opportunity to get vaccinated in January and February, enough of us did not get vaccinated. By the time this peak hit us around the third week of February when numbers started going up, we had very, very poor vaccine coverage — only about 5% or less, possibly about 2% of people who had been vaccinated,” he told the publication.
As of now, three per cent of the population in India has been vaccinated fully and 9.2 per cent of the people have received one dose.