There is a worrying trend of Covid-19 pattern in the country, said Dr Vipin Srivastava, former pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad (UoH) and prominent physicist, who anticipated the onset of the third wave of the pandemic on July 4.
The Covid-19 curve, which Dr Vipin postulated based on daily death load (DDL), has not only persisted since July 4, but has also gotten worse in recent weeks, reported the Times of India.
The DDL has gone towards more positive levels, which is unfavourable. In the 15 days period – July 24 to August 7 – it was positive on 10 occasions and seven times in the latter 10 days, the report mentions. This indicates that, notwithstanding the officially reporting data, the third wave is taking a turn for the worse.
Despite seropositivity in around two-thirds of the population, Dr Vipin has ruled out herd immunity in the country so far. “The cause for concern is appearance of ‘wild’ fluctuations in DDL since July 4. This is found to occur whenever there is a crossover in the scenario, i.e. when the number of daily deaths changes from an increasing trend to a decreasing one, or vice versa. However, an intriguing aspect of the ongoing big fluctuations in the DDL is that they are much wilder than the earlier ones and that they are not showing signs of settling down even after a month,” he said.
The reasons, according to Dr. Vipin, may be partially due to the uncertainty associated with the official data. While the number of deaths was adjusted a few times during the first wave of Covid-19, the doubts around this statistic appear to have grown exponentially following the second wave. This may be observed in the graph of daily Covid-19 deaths during the second wave, which shows large fluctuations.
When the number of new Covid-19 cases per 24 hours was in the lakhs, the physicist said, the number of recovered cases was also in the lakhs. When the former was lowered to thousands, the latter reduced to thousands as well. The Patient Load (number of new patients introduced for every healed patient) ratio was usually around 1. The highest point reached by this ratio was roughly 2.2, which occurred during the second wave, when the number of deaths per 24 hours was quickly increasing between March 9 and May 6, 2021.
He said the results indicated that the severity of the Covid-19 situation has spread so much that the DDL deduced from the nationwide data is staying positive on daily basis. “That is, the number of new Covid-19 positive cases in 24 hours is exceeding the number of recovered cases in the same 24 hours even though the number of Covid-19 deaths is hovering around 500,” he said.
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