Bengaluru / New DelhiHome Affairs Minister Amit Shah has said we should not blame the elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry for the increase in COVID-19 cases there.
Elections are important and must be held with the right precautions and guarantees. The real problems lie in organizing large gatherings and holding road shows instead of holding television addresses, organizing smaller live meetings, and so on.
Last week, the Economic times presented four maps showing a sharp increase in COVID cases in the four states and one Union area where elections took place. The election in West Bengal has three more phases. Of course, matters are also increasing sharply elsewhere, a fact that the Minister of the Interior has captured.
Shah’s argument is problematic because it implies that it’s okay to organize large, overcrowded events at a time when India’s case load could make the country the world’s Vishwaguru ‘of COVID-19 infections. He has the Indian Express that he was ‘concerned’ about Maharashtra and West Bengal, but that the former reported many more cases.
However, Shah makes three mistakes.
1. You do not need data to indicate certain points
Amit Shah and the Bharatiya Janata Party government have broadly tended to insist on data, and if the data does not exist, to say that a specific event or phenomenon did not happen.
For statistics to establish a causal link between the people who participated in election rallies and the growth in COVID infections, they should record the current growth trend, possible deviations from the trend due to the rallies, attribute the deviation to the marches and eliminate the presence of similar deviations in the data of non-polling states.
Based on these calculations, we need to know the variants that are distributed in different districts and their transfer characteristics. Alternatively, officials were able to track down and then track down each individual who participated in the rallies – a very arduous and fruitless exercise.
If you are unable to do any of these things, it would be the obvious argument that meetings and meetings were held that offer more opportunities than usual to spread the virus.
There is already an indication of a correlation in the fact that West Bengal is adding active cases much faster than Maharashtra or Delhi has been doing since 1 April.
Every day, a certain number of people get the disease, while a certain number recover from it. If more people test positive than are cured, it means that active cases are increasing. If Amit Shah says elections do not matter, he must answer why the number of daily new active COVID-19 cases in Bengal on April 18 (8,419) is 1,040% higher than on April 1, while Delhi and Maharashtra, notorious hotspots, shows a much slower rate of increase – 209% and 118% respectively.
That is, the number of people in West Bengal who are COVID-positive on a daily basis is rising almost five times faster than Delhi and almost ten times faster than Maharashtra.
Attempts to answer this question are likely to be complicated by the variants spreading in these populations, the quality of health care, the testing rate, and the outbreaks in these states that are no longer phased, and this affects the number of daily new infections and daily recovery. . .
We therefore need more data and more work to prove that there is a causal link between election rallies and the active caseload in West Bengal. But the chance of this existing link is obviously high.
2. Infection groups drive the epidemic
Maintain physical distances, wear masks and wash your hands – these are the most important guidelines for any individual today. Not following them, especially not following them en masse, is automatically a recipe for disaster. It could even be the recipe for disaster.
Both scientific studies and news reports have noted that clusters of infections played an important role in sowing large outbreaks. South Korea’s sharp rise in the early days of the pandemic last year was partly attributed to the indifference of a single person. In a meta-analysis of 65 studies, researchers found that there were 108 cluster infestation events in 13 regions around the world last year. Of these, 67% occurred in China. According to a report published by The Lancet COVID-19 Commission of India Task Force:
‘The second wave has so far been more geographically grouped. The number of districts with the top 50% decreased from more than 40 at the time of the last peak to currently less than 20, indicating a much more concentrated epidemic. In the first surge in August and September, the number of districts for the top 75% of cases was 60-100, while it was about 20-40 districts during this surge. ‘
More recently, the Times of India reported on April 7 that doctors in Mumbai say that the “rapid spread of the infection in much larger groups and the failure to prevent whole families from becoming infected, despite the isolation of index cases, are the most important factors in the ongoing transmission.”
In fact, on April 12, the Kumbh Mela himself defeated the point of Amit Shah. The mela was attended by nearly 30 lakh people from all over India and within a week of their launch, the number of cases in Haridwar, the venue, increased to an excessive extent. Fans at the mela also tested positive after returning to their cities of origin.
In light of these issues, Shah said Times Now therefore, the center appealed to the organizers of the festival to make its attendance ‘symbolic’. If the delayed fuse is set aside, the center’s decision is an acknowledgment that it knows that large, overcrowded gatherings are a bad idea. We do not have to wait until more data occurs.
3. No state currently needs rallies
Consider the following graphs showing the moving averages of seven days of property tax (from covid19india.org) in both polled and non-polling states:
Both poll-bound and non-poll-bound states show an exponentially increasing caseload, or seem to be up to it. Why do states that are not at the ballot box report exponential growth if they do not hold rallies, meetings, etc.? Do not arrange? This is due to a hidden confusing factor: the population of vulnerable people. As long as there are more susceptible people in a given population, there will be opportunities for more cases and faster distribution.
The susceptible population was adjusted between 2020 and 2021 thanks to our updated knowledge of new coronavirus variants and the possibility of becoming infected with COVID-19 more than once.
In the absence of COVID-appropriate behavior and in the presence of new variants and possibility for reinfection, there will be more and more cases, regardless of the mode of transmission – large gatherings, family functions, travel, shopping in the market, etc. A rally will only more quickly ‘transform’ susceptible people into infected people, leveling the curve.
Due to the huge nationwide shortage of hospital beds, medical oxygen, vaccines and drugs, the Indian government has flourished over this. In fact, senior government officials and ministers were in a triumphant mood barely two months ago, saying India’s epidemic had entered its ‘endgame’ and that Modi was a ‘vaccine guru’. But today it is clear that even if the new wave had caught the government off guard, the government could not have been surprised at the unwillingness of the population to deal with it. Yet it was.
Both the Central and the various state governments need to rapidly reduce the size of the vulnerable population and improve access to and quality of hospital care for those who still need it.
It should be obvious that shortening election rallies is one way to expose people in West Bengal to the virus.