WHEN WILL THE NIGHTMARE END?
When Bhramar Mukherjee, an Indian American professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, noticed an uptick in new cases of Covid-19 being reported in Maharashtra on February 27 this year, she instinctively knew that a fresh wave was going to hit India. Mukherjee tweeted that India should scale up its vaccine rollout and citizens should start double masking and avoid large gatherings. She then dialled her ageing parents in Kolkata and urged them to get vaccinated. Her parents didn’t listen to her and neither, apparently, did Indian policy makers, who prematurely declared victory over the virus after the first wave of infection subsided in November 2020.
The folly became evident in the last week of March when a tidal wave of infection hit India leaving its citizens gasping for life. From around 11,000 cases of new infections daily, it skyrocketed to over a lakh, rapidly doubling every week till by April end and early May, the numbers infected crossed 400,000 daily. It was a world record in daily cases for a single country, the highest such figure since Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the WHO in March 2020. When Mukherjee warned India of the coming wave, the country had 11 million active cases of Covid infection. In just two months that figure more than doubled and stood at 23.3 million on May 12. Among those infected was Mukherjee’s father who finally took his first dose of the vaccine only in mid-April and is now recovering from the disease. India is second only to the US in terms of number of infections caused by Covid-19. The death toll has gone up from an average of 1,000 daily in the first wave to a numbing 4,000 daily—and still counting. The big question on everyone’s mind: when will the nightmare end?
WHEN WILL THE WAVE PEAK?
To answer this question, it is important for the central government to get a good estimate of when the wave will peak and the factors that could cause its decline so as to put a strategy in place to halt the pandemic.
