 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today we're going to be talking about the COVID-19 situation in India as part of our regular updates. We are joined by Praveed Purkha, a staff of NewsClick. Praveed, thank you so much for joining us. So India remains in the top three number of countries. The number of new cases is still in the late 40,000s, the early 50,000s every single day. And in that respect, it continues to match the US and Brazil. So right now, looking at the trajectory as well as the numbers that are coming up, how do you see the progress of the disease? You know, there are two aspects to the progress. What we can see is that India's slope, what is called the curve, which is a, we normally tend to use it as a logarithmic curve, logarithmic trend. And that trend has been almost continuously this rising or at the same pace for what I can see almost the last 90 odd days. So over the last three months, we do not see any perceptible flattening of the curve as it is called. Unlike, for instance, even the United States now, after having reached four and a half million, they've crossed four and a half million bigger, you see that the rate of patients compared to the base that they have has started to decrease somewhat, though they still top the list of new infections in the world. But compared to the fact that the four and a half million base, this is actually a kind of slowing down compared to what would have been seen otherwise. Now, Brazil and India are competing with each other for the second position. India was ahead a little, now it's a little behind, but the borrowers are rising at the same speed. But if we look at the base that is there, Brazil has 2.6 million people who are already infected. India has 1.6 million already infected. And that I will say India's space of rise is actually faster at the moment than even Brazil. And considering Brazil refuses to recognize that they have a pandemic, that they have an epidemic, you have a president who refuses to acknowledge that, that is something which is quite strange because India officially has had a lockdown, accepts there is this huge problem with the pandemic. We have a state of near emergency because the disaster management act that has been invoked with the pandemic is still in place. And as a virtue of that, the government is enormous powers. Now, what it seems to be doing is using the pandemic to push through a set of measures which otherwise would have seen protests. For instance, now the new education policy, which have certainly would have seen protests from the university community. It is also trying to restructure a whole bunch of other laws. Essentially, labor laws, these kind of issues that we see are something which seems to be opportunistic in the sense that government is making COVID-19 as an excuse to ramp down a set of unpopular policies, which otherwise would have faced large scale public resistance. So I think this is one aspect of what's happening right now. And this also squares up, squares it with the basic ideology of this government, which has remained right. The only difference between the Bolsonaro, the Trump and the Modi administration has been that the Modi administration recognized there is a pandemic and the need for a lockdown, except that they've washed up the lockdown. So you don't see that lockdown having the benefits that it seems to have done in other countries in spite of a supposedly very draconian lockdown, and for almost three months. But the difference between other lockdowns in here is because you didn't provide any support to the people. You have a large number of people who then braved the lockdown itself to try and return to their village roots. These are not really migrant population, as it's been called. They are people who have roots in the villages, who have come to the cities for jobs, and they have, they're basically a part of urban working population. But they had to go back because they couldn't survive now without any jobs, without any income and no savings. And then of course, you're supposed to pay rent as well as how do you get the food, even if you get minimum rations, which in some cases were being provided. But again, accessing them was difficult. So therefore the desperation to go back to the village where there at least have some minimum sustenance. So I think that broke the lockdown and it was a complete botched lockdown at one hand. And also, if you see the numbers continuously rising during the lockdown, it also shows the preparedness wasn't there. It was a hurriedly executed lockdown without all the measures that need to go along with it to make it successful. The second aspect of the lockdown should have been to strengthen both your tracking systems and ability to quarantine patients under human conditions, not under human conditions, just shoving them into places where people didn't want to go because it's almost like a death camp. So those kinds of measures were not planned or taken. And you did see in some of the places, Russia and the hospitals. So that is the second failure that we saw. But this lockdown was not used to create the kind of public health response that you needed to make. And that is what we are paying the price now for. The third, you can see that it is spread to newer and newer areas. You have not been able to keep it, end up and probably you never could. But the point is, once it breaks from one place, there are hotspots that come up elsewhere. How do you quickly address it? So testing quickly, you have a whole public health apparatus which should be able to then respond to that. That means you need workers, health workers on the ground. We have a large health workers on the ground who are paid a pittance. They're supposed to be half volunteer, half government employees. They're really not full-time government employees. They're what are called the Asha workers. So all these, the whole tiers of the public health system seems to be ineffectual and particularly urban areas. You don't see much of a semblance of that. And people are forced to run from pillar to post for medicines and hospitals. That brings me to the last point, that the hospital system in India first went on what the government of India promised was a magic bullet, the hydrochloroquine. Like Trump, this is also being bandied about. Even today, the Indian Council of Medical Research claims its prophylactic effect, which may indeed be true, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence to show that it is so. Cuba has said that in early stages, just in the very early stages, it may have some effect, but later on it doesn't have any effect. So the medicine which does have effect, which is really dexamethasone and that is cheap. That's not expensive. It's not patented. It's available easily. We don't see a push for that in the hospital system either. And I don't think we have ICMR of the government ensuring that this is the advice given to the hospitals, and this is the first line of treatment for people who are already in oxygen, not to the other people, but people who are in oxygen then should be able to access that. So we don't see that too much of that either. And third, in part of the hospitals, saying the issue that we have then, what about if we say Remdesivir has some advantage? What about making it available cheaply? Because this is only available in the initial phase. After that, it's not really of much use, which is what even company Gilead, which has put it in the market, even Gilead accepts that in the first stage, it has some use. Second stage, margin. The which means, I guess, if we take it with the hype, not much at all. So if we take that, then also you don't see any attempt by government of India to try and break the patent of Remdesivir and make it as widely available as possible. If it becomes as widely available as any over the counter medicine, then that case, there is a possibility you will reduce the infection rate. Even if you reduce it marginally, it will reduce your transmission. And therefore the multiplier effect that comes down, which is what we're really fighting today. And so India, which has the patent act, and this is something the left had fought for, the article 92 of the patent act, it has clear provision under the health emergency and epidemic to actually do compulsory licensing. It hasn't done so. It is not moving in this direction at all. It's not making medicines widely available. It seems to have taken a hands off approach to this, leaving it to private capital and private health care systems to work it out as they want. So this has been one of the signal issues right now that we are facing. And I worry that if it spins, spins over into the vaccine issue, the India's population will be left at the mercy of the big pharma, who will then decide who gets a vaccine already. There are cues in front of the pharma companies who are blocking the sale of vaccines by reserving it for themselves. So UK has reserved 60 billion first shots for themselves. The US is also has paid money to most of these vaccines, which are right now on trial. And they have also reserved for themselves saying very clearly will help ourselves first, then we'll help others. They give the aircraft example, put your own oxygen on, then help the neighbor for putting their oxygen on, which is a completely bogus as a comparison. The issue is that US says intellectual property is sacrosanct. So you can't, if you violate their claim to patents, you come against the USTR 301 and so on. So those threats then come into place. And India, which shouldn't rally the global opinion that all of this should be public good is actually, you know, has put its head in the sand. So it is really not willing to address this at all. Yes, serum institute and other places are there, institutions are there in India, who can manufacture the vaccine. But remember, we have 1.3 billion people. So that is not going to be done in a day. I don't see the system gearing up for this. And we had a discussion the news click earlier in which Dr. Rat, one of our leading immunologists, he had said that this is what worries him that yes, vaccines will be available, but for whom? And this is something with science, the American Association of Science Journal, they also repeat that yes, vaccines will be available, but who are going to get it? And I think government of India, which had a major role to play in this issue, both locally at the national level and at the global level, is at the moment not willing to put its head above the parapet and take this issue on. And the other last issue is, of course, that you have today Chinese vaccines, which are the trial, what I call the phase three trials. So they are on par with what Moderna or the Oscar Zenka Oxford trials are doing. And they're really probably ahead in terms of the trials. I think one of the trials was launched in June. So given the fact that phase three trials are on, Russia has also started using its military also to do rapid trials for the vaccine. We are going to get vaccines from other sources, except the Western sources. Now, government of India, with the current tensions with China, having banned their companies virtually from entry into India, any new contracts will require special permission, having banned their 59 apps. We have to really see that will that also play in this vaccine war, which is currently what the US has launched on the world, literally saying all the vaccines we will control. So we will use it as a strategic weapon. There is some discussion that this is equivalent to a weapon that we can use, like when you can use other weapons. So the vaccines being turned into weapons, I'm afraid that we don't, we are not seeing any preparation on that count either. And let's face it, India's vaccine that we have launched, it's going to take much longer. We are still in the early stages, we had nowhere near where other countries are. So at least a six month gap is what we have. So given all of this, I'm apprehensive that we are going to see dark days. And this is not going to be now one part of the other part of the country. It's, I think, widespread, something that Indian Council of Medical Research is unwilling to accept that we have widespread community transmission, not community transmission in a few places, but widespread community transmission, which I say are simply refused to recognize, because if they did, they would have a lot more responsibility they're willing to take on, which is make testing much more easily available, test kits and numbers. And the government has to take on the major owners, then of controlling the pandemic. So probably two aspects the government has been claiming, some of its representatives is that one, the number of cases is high because testing is high. And second, that India's death rate is comparatively lower. So it actually is a sign of the fact that the disease, the efforts to control the disease have been successful. So do either of these arguments hold any water? Let's take the first argument that India is numbers are high because the testing rates are high. This is almost similar to what Mr. Trump had said, that we should keep the testing rates low, by which the numbers will come down. Others numbers go too high. And then my election campaign gets into trouble. So essentially, the testing rates in India are still low, meaning that we seem to see in most states, the number of infected detected against test is roughly 10%, not lower than that. If we take that into account, a lot of them are essentially quick antigen testing. So you need confirmatory tests if you really want to be sure. So they don't really detect infections per se, they detect the level at which infections are there in the group of population, and you need confirmations, particularly if you're positive, or if you have symptoms and you're shown to be negative, then you need PCR tests again. So given that taking that part out, the point is we are seeing 10% infections detected when we test. Now this, if it doesn't go to 2 to 3%, I will say our tests are still way below what they should be. So there's no question that testing today should be at least three to five times what they are. So that's a hard statistical figure. What is the ratio? You can't fudge that. You can fudge by not testing, but you cannot fudge the infection to test ratio, which is very, very visible. So that is one. Secondly, if we say we are controlling it, what do we really mean? Look at the trend chart, for instance, news click, we have a trend chart which shows what is a trend of new infections, and you will see the slope is not flattening at all. So we have a very, very steady, steady rise of infections for the last, as I said, for the last 90 days. So the argument that we are controlling the epidemic is not born out. When you say your death rates are low, I'll come to that. That's supposed to be the total number of infections. But if you look at the figures of rising deaths, rising infections, you will see that deaths follow infections. There's a two-week gap, we have 50,000 who are newly infected. For them to become serious, more 15% can become serious. Then that 15% will manifest itself later. So you really have to lag the death lags of new infections by about two to three weeks. If you see that, you will see your death rates are also rising. And if you see compared to others in the world, your new deaths, daily deaths, are the third highest today. India is the third place, Brazil, and the US in the first place. So these are the three leading countries in new infections and new deaths, being daily deaths. So I do not know where they're getting their control figures from. The only credit they're trying to seek is that our fatality rate, infection to fatality, is roughly 2.5%, also below 2.5%, and the global rates are higher. Now, there's a huge issue over here. Everybody accepts we don't know the total number of infections. So since we do not know the total number of infected, for instance, in Bombay, we have found that in some of the slum clusters, you're very densely populated, the number of people infected by serotonous surveys are roughly about 50 to 55%. Now, while the actual numbers of those who have got infected as positives are much lower. So this is not a very clear indication of what your figures really are. But I will say this, India has one of the youngest populations in the world. And we all know that above 60 or above 65 is where the mortality starts getting higher. And above 80, your mortality is roughly 20% of people who are seriously ill probably will die. So given those kind of figures, it is just shows that if you have lower figures than the global figures, it just shows that your population is younger. And that is what it is showing up. If the average death to fatality fatality to infection is roughly about 4%, we are showing 2.5%. We have done this calculation. If you really take every 10 years as a group, above 80, above 70, above 60 and break down the Indian population, our figure should be less than 1%. It should not be even 2.5%. So apples to apples, our figures, even taking government figures into account 4% and 2.5%, if you're connected with the age demographic profile that we have, it's actually much higher. So I think government is using, as it used to be said, there is lies, damn lies and statistics. I think the government of India using statistics now, the earlier used, as I also said in one of the news clip shows that we used to have earlier lies, damn lies and statistics. We now also have lies, damn lies and models. So they try to make claims based on models that how many deaths we've averted. And as you know, even models don't say you're averted deaths. What it says is your postponed deaths. So even that claim was wrong. And whether that model did show that or not, that's a different question because we have no access to that model. We only have results as claimed by the government of India. So I think these are spurious claims. And the spurious claims based on statistics, which actually don't tell the truth. Stark figures, we are the third highest in number of deaths today in the world, daily deaths. And that should tell you where we are going. Thank you so much Pravee for talking to us. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.