Everyone’s a genius in hindsight. Some make wrong decisions and defend it, some find faults in decisions after the game is over, and other accept their wrong decisions and make better decisions next time.

It’s been around a year since we started seeing Coronavirus cases in India. Lot of events have taken place- lockdowns, Unlock 1~5, cases increasing-decreasing, testing increasing-decreasing, economy falling and falling, unemployment increasing and increasing and so on.

During Lockdown testing did not increase as it should

As we can see testing increased rapidly fairly late in India. These are total number of tests – RTPCR and RAT tests. This is probably due to low number of testing kits in India, and also late incoming of testing kits from the manufacturers. Other countries got it first, or the Indian requirement was very large.

We also see peak in mid September, and after that tests have been reducing, recently even more rapidly.

Migrant population and spread of Coronavirus

Coronavirus spread is not uniform in India. It was mostly concentrated in Maharashtra, Delhi, Kerala. These are the states where people come from outside the country, be it from Middle east or US or Europe. There is large migrant population living in these densely populated regions as well. When lockdown was announced, and the migrant population didn’t see any employment opportunities, they started moving back to their native states. As we can see in the graph,

there is rapid increase in number of cases in states such as Bihar, UP etc. after Unlock 1. In other regions also, the rapid rise came very late. This may also be due to the fact that Developed states got testing kits first, and rest of India got testing kits in limited numbers due to financials or availability/ infrastructure.

Daily new cases rapidly fall after September

There is no proven reason, why this is happening. One popular reason is most of the people are already infected. What Unlocks – or opening of the country after lockdown did was slow leaking of virus everywhere, and developing of immunity. Latest sero survey shows:

“The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) noted that 21.4% of 28,589 people surveyed above 18 years of age showed exposure to the virus.” It means almost 28 crore people were infected.

Delhi which showed atleast 3 waves of Coronavirus, had the most infections, which were not detected.

“Earlier, a sero-survey of capital Delhi, the fifth such survey, found that over half the population – 56.13% – had developed antibodies against Covid-19. Delhi’s Health Minister said that the city “was moving towards herd immunity but only experts can give a clearer picture.”

Currently still large number of cases are coming in Kerala. Probably they followed social distancing very religiously, so people were not exposed, so still large number of cases are coming. Or people are coming from Middle east so number of new cases is still high. Rest of the country new cases are not coming, as also testing has reduced considerably.

So, we can see complete blocking of economy was not needed, but filters (like cloth masks stops the virus partially ) were needed to quickly build up herd immunity. Cloth mask was needed instead of N99 mask in India.

Disclaimer: This article is written based on publicly available information. Strategy Boffins makes every effort to use reliable and comprehensive information, but Strategy Boffins does not represent that the contents of the report are accurate or complete. Author is not an expert, or a researcher and opinion is based on data

Note: Do not forget to buy N95 masks