Top Hyderabad Physicist Rules Out Herd Immunity, Warns 3rd Wave Is Taking Turn For The Worse

University of Hyderabad former pro-vice-chancellor and eminent physicist Dr Vipin Srivastava, who predicted the COVID 3rd wave to begin July 4, has now cautioned that there is a disturbing trend in India, as per TNN.

The curve, which has not only continued after July 4 but also appears to have become worse in the last 2 weeks or so. This means the third wave is taking a turn for the worse, he said.

PTI

Dr Vipin also ruled out herd immunity in the country so far despite seropositivity in about two-thirds of the population. ¡°The cause for concern is appearance of ¡®wild¡¯ fluctuations in DDL since July 4. This is found to occur whenever there is a crossover in the scenario, i.e. when the number of daily deaths changes from an increasing trend to a decreasing one, or vice versa. However, an intriguing aspect of the ongoing big fluctuations in the DDL is that they are much wilder than the earlier ones and that they are not showing signs of settling down even after a month,¡± he said.

The reasons, Dr Vipin said, may partially lie in the uncertainties associated with the official data. The number of deaths was corrected a few times while the first wave of Covid-19 was on, but the uncertainties associated with this number apparently increased manifold since the second wave. This is clearly reflected in the huge fluctuations seen in the graph for daily Covid-19 deaths during the second wave.

TOI

The physicist said that when the number of new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours was running in lakhs, the number of recovered cases was also in lakhs. And when the former reduced to thousands, the latter also came down to thousands. This ratio, called Patient Load (number of new patients added for every recovered patient) generally fluctuated around 1. The maximum value that this ratio attained was around 2.2, and this was when the number of deaths in 24 hours was increasing rapidly between March 9 and May 6, 2021 during the second wave.

¡°Our results indicate that the severity of the Covid-19 situation has spread so much that the DDL deduced from the nationwide data is staying positive on daily basis. That is, the number of new Covid-19 positive cases in 24 hours is exceeding the number of recovered cases in the same 24 hours even though the number of Covid-19 deaths is hovering around 500,¡± Dr Vipin said.