 Hello and welcome to Newsclick. Today we're going to discuss in our COVID-19 roundup what the health minister, Harshavardhan, has said in parliament today. Now, he has made a number of claims. We are not going to address all of that, but we'd like to take up what I would call as the primary claims. Let's go with first his statement. The first point that we should really focus on is that a lockdown does not reduce deaths, does not prevent deaths, it postpones them. Why? Because you are slowing down the transmission of the infection from those who have already caught COVID-19 to others. Now, if you slow it down, which is what this lockdown was aimed to do, it doesn't mean the people who are not exposed will not get infected later. Therefore, the whole argument that we have reduced deaths, we have avoided deaths from the beginning, we have been calling this out and says epidemiologically it makes no sense. And for somebody who's a doctor, which Dr. Harshavardhan is and is the health minister, this claim doesn't really make any sense. If we look at the numbers and we are going to take a look at our numbers, also the global numbers, let's look at where they are. We have today a situation. We are all reaching almost 100,000 per day, new cases per day. We are currently 93,000 odd numbers. But if we look at the speed at which you're increasing, almost every week we are adding this to about 10,000 additional new cases every day. So it's about 80,000 last week. Before that it was 70,000. So if this speed at which we are increasing continues and it's a very steady number which is increasing, then we are going to see more and more cases. We are not unlike other countries and we're going to see the charts that we normally see on news click. You will see our trajectory is still going up. We have a steady growth rate that is taking place. Look at, for instance, the U.S. figures. Their daily cases are now one-third hours, which means that every day we are adding 60,000 more cases to our numbers. But the U.S. is adding, if it compared to U.S., which means India will have the highest number of active cases in the world. It will overtake the United States. The total number of cases will overtake the United States in probably around the month. This is what, in fact, the director of AIMS also said on television a couple of days ago, that, yes, India is slated to have the highest number of total cases in the world, probably in a month, month and a half. So this is where we are. So let's not give false assurances to the people that we are avoiding deaths or avoiding people who are going to get infected. In fact, we are not. We have postponed the numbers, yes, but we haven't avoided them and the proof of that is in the numbers themselves. Let's face it, India is still refusing to face up to the fact that the epidemic is out of control. The government seems to have given up virtually by claiming a false victory, as Dr. Harshavardhan has done in parliament today. We also see, because there is no messaging that we still have to fight, people are slowly giving up. We see when you go into the streets of any major town or city in the country today, you see increasingly people are going about as if it's business as usual, mask people are dropping the number of people who wear masks are dropping and to expect the police is going to challenge them as the claim seems to be. And that's how this discipline of wearing masks will be will improve is not happening, not visibly happening on the ground. So this is where the key problem is that government seems to have claimed victory moved on, whether it's China, whether it's, you know, various leaked reports coming out on the daily riots to leak reports coming out from investigative agencies in the Shushant Rajput case. All of this seems to be wanting to distract attention to what is still a life and death struggle for many. We'll come to Harshavardhan Singh's next claims. He's also claimed India has been able to limit its cases and deaths per billion to 3,328 and 55 respectively, which is one of the lowest in the world compared to similarly affected countries. The point is, India has not been able to limit its cases and deaths per million, because these numbers are growing every day. How can we talk about limiting numbers when every day you're adding nearly 100,000 people to your tally of people who are affected? You're adding more than 1100 deaths per day. So these figures are continuously moving. And if we take at the moment that numbers per million as the government of India has claimed, yes, this number is not as high as many other countries, but it is also higher than a lot of other countries. It is not one of the lowest. In fact, out of 180 countries in the world, India ranks somewhere in the middle. But you would take the average cases, you take the total per million cases, and you take what the world average is, but the world average is just a little worse than India's average. But India is just below that. It's not a very significant difference. The world average is 3,743, as opposed to this, according to the minister's statement, we are 3,328. But that's not all. We are doubling our COVID-19 cases every 25 to 30 days. This is the chart. We have shown it earlier that Indian figures are roughly doubling at 25 to 30 days. Maybe it will increase. Maybe it'll get a little better. It's not 25, 30 days. It'll be 30, 35 days. That means in another 30, 35 days are numbers, deaths per million. I'm going to come to that later. But numbers of cases per million, which is 3,328, will be double that. That means it will be about 6,600. If you take that figure into consideration, we'll be way above the world's average, which is what we talked about earlier. And it will be certainly among the worst cases in the world. That's only about a month, month and a half away. So what is it that government of India is trying to claim that somehow the epidemic is over, that these figures are not going to change? So these misleading words are limit, limiting the numbers, avoiding deaths, avoiding active cases. All of these are highly misleading because we are not avoiding anything. The numbers are increasing daily. As long the numbers continue to increase, this talk about avoiding, limiting, etc., make no sense whatsoever. Let's look at the other figure, which is 55 deaths per million. Now again, Dr. Harshavan has claimed it is one of the lowest in the world. The first question of course is we're not limiting number of deaths. It's going to double. It's going to in fact double in a month. Again, the doubling rate, what we are talking about. And also, let's face it, people as long as you fall sick today, you are at risk of being seriously ill probably about two weeks later. And you are in serious danger of mortality if ventilators, every other system works, probably another 10 days. So normally the deaths take place about 25 days after the infection. So there is a lag between number of deaths and the number of infected in proportional terms. So I would not take any solace for this 55 deaths number because only last month that we start to see really double the number that we had in the month before. So roughly when it's 25 to 30 days, that means half the number of people who are affected today as COVID-19 cases have come in the last one month. So the death figures are certainly going to climb. Even the death rates are going to climb. But India has an advantage, which is what Mr. Dr. Harshavan is not talking about, which is we have one of the youngest demographies in the world are demography. The median age of the demography is roughly 26, 27. Now you take a country which is a seriously affected country like Italy for instance, their median age was 44, 45. What does it really mean? It means the older people, the many more older people in Italy than there are in India. And as we know COVID-19 is far more dangerous, far more dangerous for people who are either immune compromised or old. And quite often the older people are also immune compromised. So if they fall sick due to COVID-19, their death rates could be as high above 80. The death rates could be as high as 15 to 20 percent. Now if we take the Indian demography, the number of people in 80 and above are relatively demographically much lower than in countries like Italy, France, Germany, even China today. So if you take that into account, correct what is the demography within which the people are more likely to die. If you do this correction, we did it in news click right in the beginning, then roughly what is 2.5 percent in Italy would be less than 1 percent in India. So if you look at Indian demography, then because of a younger age population being younger, the number of deaths are going to be lower. Now the correct characteristic, or the correct ratio to see is not deaths per total population, but what is called the case for a faith-related ratio. Among the people who have fallen ill, how many people have died? Italy, it was about 2.5 percent. If you take the 2.5 percent figure, correct it by the younger population in India, then the same number of infections should see the number of people who are who die after getting the disease would roughly be 1 percent. So the case-faith-related ratio just as a demographic correction would change from 2.5 percent to 1 percent because we have a much younger population. So these figures that Dr. Harshavathan has given actually just show that we have a younger population, therefore our numbers are obviously lower. But there's another caveat to it. Why are our numbers lower? It is because we don't register deaths properly. It's accepted that in a number of states, the number of the death registrations and the birth registrations are very poor. Bihar, UP for instance, not more than 70-75 percent of even the births are registered and in deaths the registration figures are much lower. If we talk of Bihar, there has been widespread criticism that those people who have died would be neither buried or taken to cremation. Both these figures, if you tally, who have been cremated or buried under COVID-19 guidelines are much higher than the governmental figures of deaths. So there seems to be a big mismatch between what the cremation guards, the burial grounds, those authorities are saying and they actually have to follow the COVID-19 dispensation of how this is to be done and what the government figures are and what is the catch here? The catch here is not only mismatch of figures because the right figures are not being given by the government, that's only one of it. But whenever there are co-morbidities and people die, they are not being registered that death has happened due to COVID-19, but the co-morbidity is held out to the cause of death. Now that person might have been living with the co-morbidity, so obviously the trigger is not that it's because of blood pressure he has died or because of diabetes he has died, it's a co-morbidity, but the cause of death is really COVID-19. So this is what was also tried in Delhi at one point. Finally the figures now between the burial guards, the burial places and the cremation guards now tally. This attempt to show lower death figures might also be behind a lot of the states reporting much lower deaths than actually happening. Of course, Dr. Harshabhadran has claimed credit for a lot of the issues regarding ventilators that ventilators are now available, number of people who are on ventilators are low and so on. I'm not going to enter into the debate about that. It's good if India has been able to increase the number of ICU beds and has also been able to increase the number of ventilators. We have discussed earlier that how good those ventilators are. Do they have the really the technology that is required to handle COVID-19 patients? Those are still something that we need to see, but often let us accept the government statement that they have really been able to enhance those facilities. However, if we look at the number of infections we are likely to see, that means doubling in the next 30 to 40 days, then we are looking at also a huge crisis in a number of states and in a number of districts. And that again, Bihar is in the news because we have had the floods over there. There has been dislocation. We have had reports for instances in Bagalpur district, just one doctor left, that most hospitals which have the capacity to handle COVID-19 serious cases are there only in a few districts in Bihar. So what happens to the rest? These are questions still to be answered and the situation is not significantly different in a number of other states. So if we take all of that into account, I don't think we have any cause for complacency. And unfortunately, Dr. Harshavardhan's statement in parliament today is going to make the people feel as if the COVID-19 epidemic is over. This is the biggest problem we have. Instead of saying you need to take control of what's happening, you need to really have wear masks. You need to reduce our contacts as far as possible, maintain social distancing. The messaging we are getting from the home health minister is something very different and I'm afraid it is going to make the people complacent and not see the crisis that we still are in. And to me, the biggest crisis is that India today is heading to be the number one country in the world in terms of total number of cases and it's going to happen probably in a month, month and a half at most. Now this is something which should bother the government. Instead of that, the government doesn't seem to be either messaging what the people should do and whatever measures it's taking seems to be done really large through the home ministry where circulars are being issued and even my new minutiae, what is to be done is really being determined by the home ministry because that's what the government has done. It has acquired all the spas under the not under the epidemic tax but under the disaster management tax and using this it has really made it difficult for any other issues to be raised. It is almost in a state of emergency today. All protests are banned, protests are happening but they're officially all banned and we have a situation taking advantage of COVID-19 protests, other measures being banned. We also have a huge number of measures being taken to ordinances, to other bills, parliament now short session of parliament, question hour not being there, zero hour being cut down. With all of this what we're likely to see is more and more centralization of powers but not for the purpose of controlling the epidemic but for the larger agenda which this government has and I think that's the basic crisis that we are seeing in the country today. So I think we need to bring the focus back on how to control the epidemic instead of giving it up as we seem to have done and just one last statistic I'll leave it with you that China within about two months had brought down from 82,000 total cases they had to only 3,000 cases in the next three to four months. We are having just one day alone more than what China has had from the beginning till now and I think that is a comparison we should stay in our minds that what China could do and since we do want to compete with China on various spheres and that ambition is right India is a big country why not but when you look at how they have handled the epidemic and how we are handling it there is a huge gulf of performance the result is China has normalcy today people are out on the roads they are going to schools colleges they are going to entertainment places and factories have restarted. Consumption of goods has restarted so the whole downturn of the GDP has been reversed unlike India and the United States and Brazil which are the three most affected countries today. So I leave you with the thought that in order to reopen the economy we really need to control the epidemic otherwise this will not lead to either reviving the economy or normalcy returning to the country. It is not an either or case as we have been saying we need to do both and address the economy but also address the epidemic. This is all the time we have for you click today do keep watching our videos and visit our website.