 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today for our science discussions, we are going to look at what's happening in India in terms of the rising numbers. And what does it mean for what was originally proposed as perhaps reaching some kind of herd immunity by February and the DST Supermodel, the Government of India Supermodel, which had predicted post-February, the pandemic is going to proceed. If we look at what's happening now and we have on screen for you, what are the states that are numbers which are seeing rising numbers? We have Maharashtra, we have Kerala, we have Punjab, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, out of which Kerala is actually, the numbers are still relative to others, may be considered high, numbers are actually falling. But the other five states that we have on you on your screen will show that they're all rising again and Maharashtra of course is rising and the moment rising the fastest. Now the interesting part about this is this is not what the DST Supermodel had predicted. It had predicted that numbers are going to continuously fall and we have reached somewhere something called herd immunity. We had at that time questioned this whole understanding of herd immunity we had also questioned that models don't behave the way they are supposed to behave in this kind of exercise that DST had done or the Supermodel group had done. In fact, it is much more complex as a phenomenon to model, primarily because it does not behave as a large homogeneous group. The people are really connected in different ways, they're connected to each other and when you look at groups which are connected to each other they interconnect via some people who are maybe crossing over from one group to another, connect to different groups and therefore what we have is what is in the world of modeling called essentially a small world phenomena or what are called semi-random networks. They are not random that means everybody is not connected to everybody else. Neither do they behave in a regular way and that's the nature of the epidemic that the epidemics do not follow this kind of clear parameters where you can predict what is going to happen because they're burned through groups of people and as groups are connected as the groups live close by they sort of they spread from one group to another and this is a relatively difficult phenomenon to model particularly geographically in a large country like India and also different clusters of people, different densities of people and different ways they are connected. Given that we had expected that we will see a rise and fall of the pandemic which are not going to be as predictable as the so-called modeling exercises say. Now if you look at Maharashtra today you will find as we are seeing here that roughly in about 20 days the numbers are doubling. This is about 20 days back and we have the numbers which have doubled by yesterday. Say these are yesterday's figures. This is what you see that they have gone to something like 12,000 about 20, 21 back days back they were about 5,800, 5,500, 5,600 or so. So this is about 20, 22 days we see doubling in Maharashtra. These are actually high figures in terms of rise. We haven't seen this kind of rise except in the early phase of the epidemic when we are trying to catch up without testing how many people are really sick. Otherwise we were seeing in an earlier phase when Maharashtra was the, you know still numbers were going very high. We were seeing a rate of increase which was doubling which was roughly about 30 days to 35 days a little later. So this is a sharp rise and if we look at Punjab we look at Gujarat, we look at Madhya Pradesh and we look at Delhi they're almost all rising at about the same pace. Now this does not mean we should panic because it may be early days yet we might still see a flattening very soon. So again, predictability is not my intention but to say that the epidemic is over or the pandemic is over in India because we saw some fall earlier is not going to be correct. This is now being called the second wave. Now we have had some early rise and fall Delhi had supposedly three waves but if we look at all of that as something which were short rise, short falls that this is indeed a second wave that we are seeing and it would seem to show that we are still going to see the epidemic continue the pandemic continue in India unless we can bring it down through either what are called non-pharmaceutical measures that means not measures of vaccination or medicine but essentially through social containment, masks social distancing, et cetera or through vaccination and this has been what we have held right through that we are not going to see the epidemic go away unless we are able to vaccinate in large numbers and therefore what we are seeing is what was expected by all of us who have been predicting the pandemic will continue and that we are nowhere near herd immunity this is now being born out by figures that we see in front of us. Now if you go over to another part of the chart and that's an interesting again exercise to see these are the cities that are there which are affected currently and you will see out of the cities that you can see out of the cities Pune, Nagpur, Mumbai, Thane are the four top cities as of now which are affected followed by Bangalore and Delhi which are relatively a little way down which again shows that it is not Maharashtra as a whole that is the grip of the pandemic but really these four cities which are seeing that there are a large number of people who are affected by COVID-19 here. Now the papers and again it's the response of the papers looking at the numbers I've said there's no cause for worry as yet because the number of deaths are actually lower than the earlier phase of the pandemic. Now here I would like to caution our viewers that this is actually a statistical anomaly right now because normally deaths take about two to four weeks lag before they manifest themselves obviously when you fall sick you don't die before two to four weeks of the event if you are likely to die that is and therefore there is always a gap between the number of people who are affected infected right now and the statistics we are likely to see in terms of death so we'll have to wait till we can draw any conclusion out of that it would be good if the numbers of deaths because we now know much more about the disease are really lower or hospitals are better equipped to deal with the kind of infections they are seeing they already have an experience of handling acute cases earlier so maybe our health rates will improve that's a caution that we must still take that yes it may improve but it may not we need to watch the numbers and we should not predict something we have not seen as yet very clear therefore we are seeing a rising second wave as many other countries are seeing we are not the only ones Europe again we seem to see rising numbers the interesting part and I have to say it interesting not in a good sense of the term is that a lot of the places which are seeing rise of numbers are the ones who saw the rising numbers earlier as well that means it seems to be still hitting hard the populations where earlier hit which would also seem to be explained by the fact that the infections never really went away it's certain groups that had been affected through which it had burnt out but other groups were there who were slowly getting infected and at some point or the other it again starts burning through new population clusters which are not affected earlier we had discussed with Professor Satyath Rat earlier that in Pune for example the slum clusters were the ones where the infections the numbers had been high and set a positivity integrated that those clusters have been badly affected later on it's a middle class colonies which are getting affected and this is true for Delhi as well so what we are seeing is new groups who are not earlier showing large numbers of infections unlikely to show number of infections in this round because the number of people who do not have immunity is still very large of course it leaves one other important question which is a question mark that is it because new variants are now also coming into India we know there are new variants in UK there are new variants in Brazil there are new variants in South Africa and a lot of them are also reaching the United States because US is well connected to all of these places and of course if it reaches UK or US as you know it also reaches India so is this happening? We also have the United Arab Emirates from which certain numbers have also come back to India it also because United Arab Emirates seem to have opened itself during the Christmas holidays and New Year holidays there were large numbers of people who went there their infections also exploded as well as what the might have exported to other places so it is possible that the variants now are also emerging and it could be also an Indian variant which we do not know about which has a higher rate of infection may not therefore necessarily mean more serious infections but a possibility of a higher rate of infections this needs more genomic studies the sequences of the virus which are affecting the people must therefore be examined and we have to monitor that closely we have not seen in the press or by the government any reporting of the kind of variants we are seeing among the new people who are getting infected that's something we need to monitor but it is very clear that if we look at what's happening in India today that we are seeing a second wave if I discount the earlier smaller ebbs and flows if that's not really a wave but what we are now seeing is clearly a second wave and that second wave does seem at the moment to be gaining pace we have to watch whether we can flatten it or not does it mean we should have a different policy for vaccination? I'm going to raise this question because it doesn't seem there is any discussion on this but looking at the numbers going up in Maharashtra in Punjab in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi should we actually have a change in our vaccination policy particularly those urban clusters where we are seeing a number of new cases emerge as we talked about the cities in Maharashtra as well as cities like Bangalore or Delhi where numbers may be going up should we then plan for a more intense vaccination focus in these places and try to flatten the curve early? These are policy level questions we need to pose we need to ask Kerala is in an interesting case because the numbers never really went down sharply they managed to flatten the curve the rise was always slower than other places they flattened the curve they could handle the numbers that they saw in the hospitals and the current phase what we see is a fall slowly in Kerala of numbers so it may not be though it is the second highest right now in India but the numbers are roughly around at the moment around 2,300 or so and this is something which is relatively much lower than what it was say a few weeks back which is about 5,000 or so so Kerala is at the moment to be watched, monitored its numbers are going down of course there is an election in Kerala that may lead to further rise of figures we have to keep watching but there is no question that I think we have to keenly watch what happens in the four towns or the four cities in Maharashtra what happens in Delhi and what happens in Punjab because Punjab also seems to show rise in figures Gujarat was one of the earliest states to be affected so was Manthapadesh both seem to show rises at the moment so these are things that we'll have to watch particularly focus where the infections are rising and maybe we should really privilege those places in terms of vaccine this is all the time we have today for NewsClick in our science show do keep watching NewsClick and also visit our website