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While COVID-19 continues to be transmitted to more people throughout the globe, places like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad etc have shown that the curve is yet to flatten to the expected level. The total number of cases as on December 18 is nearly one crore and which indicates that community transmission had already taken place even as early as April. However, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare(MoHFW) including the government agency- Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) are both in denial mode by insisting that community spread has not taken place. Presently, India’s nose diving Covid-19 numbers may have come as a relief but till November, the country had missed about 90 infections for every detected case. While states like Delhi and Kerala had missed just about 25 infections for every case, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are estimated to have missed about 300 infections for every case detected. A case in medical terms refers to an infection that has been medically diagnosed. Manindra Agrawal, a member of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and professor at the Department of Computer Science at IIT Kanpur, predicted that the pandemic will taper off by February 2021 in India. An analysis in September had shown that India had missed about 60-65 infections for every detected case. DST , had developed the India-specific supermodel for COVID-19.The under reporting of COVID-19 cases in India may stem from the government’s political interest to suggest that its strategy on COVID-19 has paid off. On May 15, the government disclosed that there were 86,000 COVID-19 cases in India whereas, as per the sero survey report by a panel formed by ICMR but which was not revealed, indicated that there were in fact 60 lakh COVID-19 cases during the same period. Even when eminent virologists and epidemiologists had said that based on their studies, the virus was spreading through community transmission, the government refused to admit it. Delhi the national capital is back at its worst over COVID-19. Earlier, the Delhi government admitted that community transmission had already taken place but this was rejected by the MoHFW including ICMR. Delhi is currently battling a winter surge in Covid-19 cases as temperatures plummet and air pollution rises to dangerous levels. The number of cases which had come down to 2,000 from 4,000, are now shooting upwards of 7,000 and up to 8,000 in a day. Though epidemiologists said the recent decline in cases and deaths was a promising signal, yet it was far too early to say that the pandemic is receding. For one, just high testing and declining case counts may not be enough to come to a conclusion. Half of the total tests India is conducting are the rapid antigen one, that are not accurate. According to scientists at Indian Institute of Sciences, Bengaluru, by January 1, 2021, India would have possibly reached close to 3 crore infected cases (over 60 lakh ‘active’ cases and 10 lakh fatalities). They also predicted that the pandemic is not expected to ‘peak’ before March 2021. Strategy against COVID-19 has somehow fallen prey to government’s spin doctors and that itself, along with COVID-19 is of great concern. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Doctoring facts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}