 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We are of course looking at a steep horizon figures globally. Omicron the wave is definitely on, meaning that it has become possibly in most places the dominant variant of concern. We have the US figures, the French figures, Indian figures, Italian figures, UK figures, which are the leading ones in the world at the moment in terms of countries. All of them show almost a vertical rise and some plateauing starting to happen, but yet very, very small things if you will in the graph and it might very well be the belated New Year Christmas tests catching up. Or we might not be peaking in numbers, but our testing capacities may be peaking and even that will show a false flattening, but it will show higher positivity. So when will it flatten is a question we are going to ask Professor Satyajit Rat, who has been our oracle of COVID and that might sound rather bad, Satyajit to give you that title, but nevertheless that's how we look at it. Numbers in the US looking very bad. It does seem to indicate that Indian numbers which are also about less than, little less than a half of our peak figures in the Delta wave earlier, but the vertical trajectory that we have seen in different countries means that we are likely to overshoot that in number of say maybe two, three weeks time. And in the case of India, we can see very clearly that Calcutta is very much on the rise, the positivity ratios are more than 50%. That means one in two tests are coming positive. So looking at all of this, before we get into the Indian scenario Satyajit, do you have anything to tell us about the nature of the Omicron? Shall we say wave? I know you don't like that word, but in terms of the Omicron numbers going up rapidly in various cities, in London it seems to be plateauing somewhat and even falling a little. Do you think taking into account now the South Africa graph earlier and what we are beginning to see in other cities, particularly London being the next one to go up and probably New York, that we can make some predictions about the nature of the cases that we are going to see. Is it going to be a short, sharp rise followed by a fall? Or is it something that we still have to judge? I think that it would be premature to make any claims with any definitive expectations at this point. Part of it is that the South African experience of a very, very rapid rise accompanied by a reasonably rapid fall has not been precisely extrapolatable to other situations. We are still approaching plateauing. We are nowhere near falls anywhere else. Secondly, and a little more worryingly, the rates of hospitalization, the rates in intensive care and even the numbers of deaths which appeared to be quite low in the South African experience. If you look at, I think it's in the New York Times today, if you look at the New York Times graph, which is quite conveniently recalibrates the current wave numbers to their wave numbers from last winter. The numbers in hospital, the numbers in intensive care, the numbers dying, corrected for case numbers and time lags are not dramatically different between last winter and this winter. That's an overstatement. They are somewhat lower, but they're not dramatically lower in their present situation as compared to last year. Now, this is different, apparently, from the South African experience with Omicron and it underlines the point that we've been making in these conversations again and again that no one particular combination of circumstances in a given situation is going to be precisely reproduced somewhere else. So the argument that Omicron is a mild virus, the argument that, you know, all is well, does receive a certain amount of narrative from these New York data. All said and done, this is not to say that Omicron is as bad as Delta. This is simply to say that we don't know and we should be progressing to making conclusions to base policies on with caution. Quick two additional facts for our viewers. That what Satyajit has also been explaining to us earlier that South Africa is a younger population in terms of the age profile demographic profile, which is true for India as well, compared to, for instance, European countries and the United States. Secondly, that in the United States, there are large pockets of those who have not been vaccinated. And it does appear that those who are not vaccinated, the numbers of people who tend to become hospitalized or become more seriously ill seems to be not very different from what Delta showed earlier. So in that sense, Omicron by itself is not as benign as it is made out to be. It is that we have got a certain amount of immunity. We are not a naive population as epidemiologists would like to say. That means we have some immunity due to either infections or vaccines. So the fact of the matter is we have a new variant. The fact of the matter is that this variant is spreading extremely rapidly, extraordinarily rapidly. And therefore, regardless of what the precise number of severe illnesses that this particular strain causes, that rapid rise in numbers is going to lead to significant numbers of people in hospital. And therefore, caution is required to be the order of the day. And it's also the simultaneously, you're going to see people in the hospitals falling ill. They have been really withstanding enormous pressures for the last 19, 20 months, if not a little longer. And therefore, they're also stretched beyond what would be normal for any hospital staff. So you're really going to see the double whammy of numbers going up for hospitals. At the same time, the hospital staff being hit, which means that we really need to prepare a public health system again. People are talking about booster doses and so on. Of course, we are calling it precautionary doses in India. But if we look at the 39 weeks gap that has been created by the government, and I presume it's because they still have not vaccinated at least most of the target population yet with the second dose, we still have quite a bit short on that. So therefore, they want to space out the booster doses, except maybe for the hospital staff, the frontline staff. Because with 39 weeks gap, I don't think very many people will be eligible for the second, third dose. And even if they are, the effect is not going to be felt at least in the first part of the wave that we are seeing at the moment. So the booster would take certainly some time to come on board. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, even for frontline healthcare related professionals and workers, given the reality of how many doses we can administer per day in the country, it's very unlikely that over the next two or three weeks, the trajectory, the direction that the numbers of cases take is unlikely to be affected by how many boosters frontline workers get. So we have to be looking at slowing down the rate of spread by non-pharmaceutical measures, masking being at this point the dominant one with higher and higher efficiency of masking and a greater and greater acceptance of masking across all daily life situations. And Satyat, the most important part here is that even for the hospital workers, I don't think there is that much of an awareness. Forget here, even elsewhere regarding what kind of masks to use, how it should be well fitted. And particularly those who are going to come in contact with COVID patients, not to have simple cloth or even surgical masks, but you really need to have masks, which are N95. And there's a chart which we will share with our viewers, which indicates what is the percentage likelihood of infection. How much time can you spend with somebody who's not wearing a mask without risk of infection? Maybe a few minutes and how much you can spend if you have N95 masks, both sides, or if you have N95 masks and not such a good mask on the other side. Let me make a related point of actual practical significance, which is it's all very well for us to talk to our communities and people about masks, about the efficiencies of masks. None of that is going to get any traction and in fact has not gotten any traction if masks are not, if high efficiency masks are not widely available to ordinary working class people. And really the question to ask is, why is it that at the end of the second year of a respiratory disease pandemic, we still do not have masks and mask access policy as a basic feature of our anti-pandemic response? And this is very, very surprising because we have a Disaster Management Act, which gives emergency powers to the central government. Production and coordination of policies regarding masks should have been the central task of the government, of the central government at this point, because they have the powers and the necessary muscle to be able to put this into production. But also the CDC has covered the criticism that it has not still really has a good masking policy set forward for the hospitals as well as the general population. So in that sense, we seem to be stumbling very much close to what the other large democracy in the world seems to be doing and copying its bad policies. Let me connect an issue here. We have both political and administrative establishment figures repeatedly making a perfectly valid point that culturally communities, especially in crowded marketplaces, in indoor gatherings do not seem to be masking, do not seem to be worrying about physical distancing. While I'm not suggesting that they are wrong in saying this, I am suggesting that it is inadequate to be hectoring your people in the absence of giving them the resources that they need to be able to adopt these pandemic related norms. And that for me is an absolutely pressing matter. So not only free vaccines for the people, but free masks for the people should be a demand. The last question before we really log off today is the issue of this against the famous infamous controversial Sutra model or whatever Manindra Agarwal seems to be talking about. Now we had discussed this earlier. This model as he himself confesses has no epidemiological or biological models built into it. It's purely about numbers and it's really looking at the past to predict the future. What in our terminology of modulus is to call a trivial model. You predict today's weather based on yesterday's weather and that of course gives you a fairly good prediction, but really not very useful if it goes beyond say two days or three days as we all know. So why is again the Sutra model coming back into prominence? Is it because the media has really nothing much to talk about and Sutra gives them a certain degree or Manindra Agarwal gives them a certain degree of comfort? Well, these two shall pass. We're all looking for certain things and modellers appear to fall into categories. Those who acknowledge the uncertainties and the ambiguities of their calculations and attempt to learn something nonetheless from them. And those who offer certain things. It's unsurprising that modellers offering certainty are very much the flavor of the moment with the media. The fact of the matter is that no model is of this kind is predicting anything particularly reliable beyond a week or so into the future. Conversely, you and I and our audience, none of us needs the crystal ball of a model to make some estimates about what is likely to happen a week or so into the future based on what we've been seeing over the past few days. So at this point, I don't think that models and model based projections are going to be greatly helpful. What would be helpful and what does not seem to be happening is unlike some other countries, India is not collating, collecting and putting into the public domain real time daily data on hospitalizations, on intensive care unit admissions, on oxygen usage and ventilator usage, all of which are going to be the critical features of how we will weather the coming weeks. Those are the numbers that policymakers in public health as well as in the broader sense have to take into account when putting day by day policies into place. They are also the numbers that would begin to tell us whether our situation as we said at the beginning of this conversation is somewhat more like the South African situation or whether our situation seems to be something like what the New York situation has shaped up to be and yet those numbers we're not seeing in the public domain. And in fact, we're seeing some wrong numbers in the public domain. For instance, the government to be there today has put forward this number, I mean today meaning whatever time yesterday, that there are 4,000 Omicron cases in India out of 1,70,000 cases. Now what they really mean is of course that the samples tested with Omicron is really 1% of the total samples, positive samples that go to them, that out of that 4,000 are Omicron cases and therefore it is not that out of 1,76,000 we have got 4,000 Omicron, rest are all Delta, Alpha, Gamma, Beta, whatever it might be. They're really at the moment let us assume that about 80 to 85% if not 90% cases are Omicron as it is probably in most countries which we are seeing a win. Okay Satyajit, before we wrap up our session can you tell us in one or two sentences what is it that we should look forward to and apart from the numbers that you've talked about of course the government of India figures which are not being given. Also the question of the positivity ratio and the fact that Calcutta shows more than 50% positive test which indicates the number of tests are completely inadequate at the moment to cater to what we see as the nature of the pandemic. Clearly we are under counting case numbers. My earnest hope is that we are at least under counting hospitalizations, intensive care examples by a much smaller factor than we are under counting actual case numbers. We do need to expand testing although we no longer need large-scale Omicron specific testing. We do need to expand COVID testing but over and beyond COVID testing we need we should have gotten but we need far more careful nuanced numbers of just how much pressure our critical healthcare sector is under in order to plan better as we go forward. Thank you very much Satyit for being with us. For all our viewers please keep continuing watch on our COVID updates and also do visit our website.