Dose-Response-Relationship of COVID – India lost to virus through fear mongering and lockdown

 

Except a very few pathogens, most of the pathogens known to our scientific world can cause infection only when the initial load or inoculum or dose of the pathogen is ‘sufficient enough’ and otherwise the pathogen may just make a short landfall in vast majority of people and then would disappear to nowhere.  

Influenza virus certainly follows the rule of dose-response-relationship and why even the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918-1919 had followed the above rule. 

Human coronavirus 229E (HcoV-229E) has also shown such relationship. 

In the case of HIV, lower the viral load, longer the incubation period and higher the viral load, shorter the incubation period to make a person from HIV positive to become full blown AIDS has been observed.  

In the case of Measles, higher the pathogen load, greater the spread and lower the initial dose, poorer the spread of the pathogen has been noticed. 

In the case of Tuberculosis (TB), sputum positive individuals of bacilli spread the disease effectively than those yield positivity of the bacteria only in blood culture.  Same is the case with Streptococcus pneumonia also.

From the above universal doctrine that most pathogens follow, we can draw several epidemiological possibilities in India. 

Asymptomatic people are less likely to discharge high viral load of COVID and therefore are less likely to infect others.  People with mild symptoms are likely to discharge only very low dose of the virus and hence such low dose is also likely to cause only mild infection in others. 

People with severe infection are only likely to discharge heavy dose of the virus and are likely to infect others effectively. 

People who receive mild dose of the virus and remains either asymptomatic or with mild symptoms are likely to develop ‘some’ level of natural defence against the virus and in due course, their threshold limit against high load of virus also might increase and are also unlikely to develop severe to life threatening infection, in future.   On the contrary, those who  despite receiving low dose of the virus if develops severe infection, we need to view and associate such situations more due to the poor immune status of the individuals and not due to pathogenic potential of the virus. 

It means, if people are allowed to move and mix with each other freely, the asymptomatic and those with mild symptoms may make rest of the population immune and not infected. 

In any case, susceptible individuals may develop infection and as a general thumb rule, infected people are less likely to move so freely in general population and hence are unlikely to discharge high dose virus to general public. 

Just look at how topsy-turvy strategy that we had adopted towards COVID from the beginning?  

To save the highly susceptible people, we forced everyone to stay at home and in some cases, our lockdown measure also forced our healthy individuals to receive high dose of the virus by confining them in four walls of the house (assuming someone was infected at home) and instead allowing them to become immune to the pathogen if they were left free. 

If we have not adopted the draconian lockdown, large number of people would have developed natural immunity and if not, at least higher threshold against the virus.  

From the beginning it was noticed that, in India, people with mild symptoms and or without any symptoms were only higher in numbers than severe cases. 

People with mild symptoms and or without any symptoms (asymptomatic), in all possibility would have only discharged very low volume of the virus which would have done enough good to India by helping people to develop some level of threshold against the virus, had there been no lockdown.

If the so called experts claim that such immune defence is not possible against COVID, can they assure and ascertain the vaccine would achieve the same? 

No vaccinated people will get the infection and therefore they need to wear mask, can our experts agree to this logic? 

When such stringent question is posed to our medical experts, immediately they would say, the vaccinated people may not develop severe infection and the death rate also would be less among vaccinated people.  If that were true, the immunity likely to be developed directly from natural exposure to low dose of virus (from asymptomatic and with mild symptoms) is also high but why the same experts did not allow that to happen and why they recommended lockdown and caused huge economic and employment loss to our country?

Can the ‘cut, copy, paste’ experts (modern medical practitioners) say how much of virus is required to cause severe infection?  Have they seen significant damage due to COVID differently from other pathogens in those patients who were declared to have died of COVID?  

Based on the symptoms if our medical fraternity is allowed to declare people as positive for COVID, then why don’t we declare the people as positive for tuberculosis or other diseases the same way because the symptoms of COVID shares with all most all common ailments? 

By declaring vociferously and valiantly about all the symptoms of COVID to public continuously, several people have started to correlate even the minor health problems to COVID and psychosomatically develop breathing distress and other complications.  If we had told people in the beginning about the new pathogen and advised them to adopt self-discipline, today COVID would not have been a problem in India  A few might have developed severe infection due to COVID, got admitted for treatment and India would have waded comfortably through the rough weather. 

We contracted the entire problem to medical community and looked at the problem only from symptom level that is from treatment angle. 

But how to make our people immune and resilient to COVID so naturally, such possibility we never ever considered or valued.  Today we are adopting vaccination programme to make India immune against COVID.  If we had followed the law of natural selection and principles of biology, by now we would have got vast majority of people with higher threshold against COVID. 

By imposing lockdown, we killed not only our economy, education, employment opportunity, manufacturing sector and other un-organized sectors but also prevented the natural selection to take place in India where people would have naturally developed higher threshold from lower viral load discharged by people with mild symptoms and or those without any symptoms. 

Instead, now we are trying to achieve the same through vaccination.  COVID is a small time flue to vast majority of people and it can be deadly only to those who are highly susceptible and in any case susceptible population is always vulnerable if not to COVID to all other pathogens as well. 

Age alone does not make one susceptible and only the pre-existing medical condition makes a person highly susceptible.  Even an aged person without any co-morbidity if ingest low dose of virus may likely to develop only mild infection; the dramatic recovery of several aged people from COVID testify the above possibility. 

Hope good sense will prevail, Indians will get their freedom and so shall the COVID virus. 

COVID is an exaggerated medical problem, lavish ex gratia of science, boon to medical fraternity and finally a busy sport to our administrators.  

India must move away from COVID, we have to rebuild our economy, must make our education vibrant, must create employment opportunity, must abolish income tax than keep worrying about COVID, small time flu.