Chennai: Even as the raging second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc in India, the Chief of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said that he is very concerned about the fast-growing caseloads in the country.
‘The situation in India is a devastating reminder of what the virus can do,’ he told a virtual briefing in Geneva.
People are dying across the world because they are not being vaccinated against Covid-19, they are not being tested and not being treated, Ghebreyesus said.
The situation in the country seems to be slipping out of hands with each passing day, amid acute shortage of oxygen beds and key emergency drugs like Remdesivir.
Shocking it may sound, scientists working on a mathematical model to work out the course of Covid-19 pandemic say there is a possibility of a peak between 11-15 May with 33-35 lakh total ‘active’ infections.
Also, one of America’s highly regarded epidemiologists and biostatisticians, Professor Bhramar Mukherjee of Michigan University, has said that according to her mathematical projections, India could have 500,000 daily Covid-19 cases and 3,000 daily Covid deaths by May.
She has told Karan Thapar in a 28-minute interview for The Wire that in terms of infections, the peak will come in mid-May when India could see 8-10 lakh daily infections and in terms of deaths, the peak will be two weeks later in May-end when India co\uld expect 4,500 daily deaths.
This means the number of ‘active’ cases in India will keep increasing roughly for another three weeks before a decline.
If the current model shows the trend correctly, the mid-May peak would be three time higher than the first peak of over 10 lakh ‘active’ cases witnessed on 17 September last year.
According to Manindra Agrawal of IIT Kanpur, involved with the national ‘super model’ initiative, ‘Our model shows a peak of cases of ‘new’ infections, which are being observed on a day-to-day basis, may be noticed during May 1-5 at about 3.3 to 3.5 lakh infections per day. It will turn the peak of ‘active’ cases to around 33-35 lakhs 10 days later between 11-15 May.’
