War, weapon, strategy - What India missed to fight novel corona?

The recent interview of a few epidemiologists in India after seeing the steady increase in corona positive cases made their opinion clear and crisp that India’s young must be exposed to novel corona to develop herd immunity and that is the only way we can solve the pandemic and we must try to save and protect those vulnerable groups from novel corona, at any cost.   

We should look at the views of the epidemiologists as strategic retreat or conceding defeat in our war against corona.   In a country like India, even if one individual carries or harbours corona virus for a minimum of 3-5 days is sufficient to spread the virus to large proportion of our population considering the R₀ value of the virus.  Eliminating the virus in India is almost impossible.  Further, the confusion created by the scientists with their incidental or accidental observation about the survival rate of corona in air, external artefacts, its presence in faecal discharge, the possibility of oral ingestion etc., have only strengthened the possibility that novel corona has already got its citizenship rights in India and hence even CAA or NRC rule cannot be applied against corona to evict from India.

The question that needs to be debated in public is about what epidemiological understanding our scientific and medical fraternity has obtained about novel corona in Indian context to suggest all India lock down?

By locking down India, have we not prolonged the stay of corona in India? 

We have only reduced the speed of the spread through the lock down and nothing more than that.   The virus is going to hang around with our population for a while with occasional worst manifestations of COVID 19 and or death. 

We should have adopted dharma yuddha against corona than kuta yuddha or guerrilla warfare. 

We should have used infantry force to fight corona than Brahmastra (lock down) in the first instance.  We should have adopted proper sensitization strategy along with setting up medical aid centre at every village level, mobile health care services as first step. 

Our scientific and medical fraternity should have studied the interaction and spread of novel corona in all affected individuals for a while than how to prevent the spread of the virus in the community.  

We should have understood the virus better in our population, Indian ecosystem and other diverse factors that are so unique to India is going to impact corona adversity  than going so blindly and precariously after the wisdom generated by western world and adopted the same recipe called lock down to prevent the spread of the virus.  Corona entered India much late; our scientists and medical fraternity had enough time to strategize but they appeared failed miserably.

If the government had shown readiness to set up mobile clinics and health aid service centres to every 100 families all over India, still the cost for the above would have been far too less than the economic disaster caused by all India lock down. 

We can only claim we have won the war partially and the war will continue for another one or more year. 

In Indian mythology, there are two types of war strategies are discussed such as Dharma yuddha and Kuta yuddha.  Dharma yuddha means fight as per the rule and Kuta yuddha means fight through several treacherous and deceitful ways.  Partly we should have let people of India to fight directly the coronavirus.   

Against novel corona virus, a country like ours with such huge population, social and economic disparity, illiteracy, ignorance, superstitious beliefs, huge burden of both non-communicable and neglected third world diseases and millions of people not even having fulfilled Maslow’s order of priority in life and millions and millions who rely on private companies for the survival, awareness, ‘self-defence’ and owning up responsibility alone would work and not lock down. 

If not, during the lock down period, after the lock down is revoked, most of the Indians are likely to get exposed to the virus because of the Indian situation.  So flattening the corona curve is possible when we stop testing and not get to know of its prevalence in our population.  We should stop thinking about corona and focus more on COVID 19 patients.

Instead of ending the problem, through lock down, we have only prolonged the problem for an indefinite period of time. 

The problem that we face today is quite strange.  Three groups of corona positive people are likely to exist in our population such as those carry the virus without any symptoms called asymptomatic carries, people who are in pre-symptomatic stage and people who exhibit non-specific symptoms but carries virus.  About 70% of corona positive people in Maharashtra are reported to have no symptoms of COVID 19.  

Diagnosing those exhibit all or near all clinical manifestations of COVID 19 may be quite easy but how are we going identify, test, confirm and quarantine all those asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic and non-specific symptomatic carries of corona in our population? 

Even if we do a random testing in our large population, can we confirm all those who carry the virus have been tested, confirmed and quarantined and those outside of the above three groups needs not worry about corona?  

India did too much to prevent the spread of the virus in the community but with little to least understanding about the virus and its interactions within the host system in India?

Do we know the least viral load required to cause infection? In which part of the our body, the virus multiply maximum, how long it would survive in human body, at what stage, the carrier of the virus becomes infective to others? 

Have our medical and scientific fraternity, at least asked all the above questions prior to suggest lock down measure to prevent the spread of corona. 

The conventional wisdom and the established norms of epidemiology written in the academic books don’t work in a country like India in dealing novel corona.  We should have gathered our courage from ground zero; Indians fight everyday against variety of primary, secondary and tertiary pathogens, live with several diseases, live to suffer and sufferings become part and parcel of our routine life. 

Considering the global death rate due to novel corona, India should have gained confidence than fear because corona can’t fight even our infantry or cavalry force.  Why then we used Brahmastra (lock down) to fight corona? 

The decision of lock down India may not be a political one but it may have taken due to the health and medical scare created by our health care policy makers like ICMR, DST, CSIR etc. 

It is like we have used overloaded gun to fight mosquito.  When death becomes inevitable, dying cannot be prevented.  As of now, novel corona does not have the strength to cause death to a healthy person.  That means, novel corona is not a primary pathogen at all. 

We waged a big war against corona, we lost several weapons, we had no clear strategy, our medical and scientific community has let down India because they did little to learn about corona but did everything from beg, borrow and steal the wisdom and experience of the western world because, that was the easiest option. 

ICMR, DST, CSIR etc., doesn’t have to contest election, their job and paraphernalia are well assured, even after retirement, money from government exchequer would continue to go to their house in the form pension, why should they bother about India or Indians.

Government should review its policy on whether do we need ICMR, DST, DBT etc., and if yes, should we continue with the existing style of functioning or should we hire talents from US and other European countries where many Indians are the top scientists and epidemiologists, to head ICMR, DST, DBT and other scientific bodies in India.

Modi should not shy to decorate most of the existing scientists in all the above government agencies as Maargadarshak (मार्गदर्शक).