![]() ![]() "The ‘Indian paradox' really is quite puzzling," says Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. ![]() "When we do not even have access to reporting of death by age, gender, and location, how do we construct a hypothesis or design a study?" "We have been trying to find explanations for the low number of deaths in India since last year," says a signatory of the appeal, microbiologist Gagandeep Kang from the Christian Medical College. Official figures suggest that, compared with other countries, India has recorded relatively few deaths given its count of COVID-19 cases. By then, many hospitals had become overwhelmed.ĭebate has swirled over whether new variants or a waning of immunity are at work in the current explosion of cases, just how many people have become infected, and-most contentious-how many have died. A few weeks later, India topped 350,000 cases in 1 day, setting a new world record. Some researchers even suggested that, because nearly half of people in several places had antibodies indicating previous infection, India might be approaching herd immunity.īut the devastating surge starting in late March gave the lie to that idea, with 10,000 cases alone in hard-hit Pune the day the KEM team visited Karandi. In early February, with cases dropping below 10,000 per day, restrictions were dropped, political leaders staged massive rallies, and masks became a rare sight in many crowded locales. The current COVID-19 surge, which first overwhelmed Maharashtra state and now is rolling through the rest of India, has humbled those who thought the country had bested the disease. "While new pandemics can have unpredictable features, our inability to adequately manage the spread of infections has, to a large extent, resulted from epidemiological data not being systematically collected and released in a timely manner," they wrote. Yesterday, hundreds of Indian researchers signed an appeal for the government to release what it has and collect more. Studies like KEM's are also crucial to tracking India's pandemic and determining whether, as some researchers believe, the horrific death toll is actually lower than expected from the rate of infections. "The data are very much important to convince the policymakers that we need interventions in rural areas." "When we started this serosurveillance, it was thought that the rural area was not much affected," Dayma says. ![]() Girish Dayma, who helps oversee this research program run by a satellite of King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital in Pune, says the team's surveys to date show that up to 40% of these villagers have antibodies for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Later, the team would scour the blood for antibodies that indicate past run-ins with COVID-19. ![]() They spent more than 1 hour taking blood samples at a cluster of houses shared by three generations of one family. They drove 20 minutes to the village of Karandi, slowing to pass caravans of migrant sugarcane cutters in ox carts. VADU, INDIA-At a tiny rural hospital about 1 hour's drive northeast of Pune, India, in early April, a team of workers loaded an SUV with coolers, syringes, vials, thermometers, and electronic tablets. Science's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center. ![]()
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