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Queuing for the second Covid-19 vaccination in Ajmer, Rajasthan: India will probably not reach its vaccination target by the end of the year - so far only about seven percent are fully immunized
Photo: Himanshu Sharma / Anadolu / Getty Images
July, maybe August.
These would be the safer, quieter months in India.
Those where the coronavirus would be relatively well contained in all states.
The renowned epidemiologist Bhramar Mukherjee from the University of Michigan predicted this in the spring.
What she predicted in her model calculations at the time: By May, the number of infections would rise frighteningly quickly - and then fall very quickly.
In fact, shortly afterwards, in April and May 2021, pictures from Indian hospitals went around the world in which people were suffocating in the corridors because there was no more oxygen;
Covid dead were burned en masse in parking lots.
Terrible scenes.
A look at the current statistics shows: Mukherjee was right on both points.
The infection curve in India between April and July protrudes from the course like a pointed tooth.
The curve rose as steeply as it fell afterwards.
July was a relatively quiet month.
Last Tuesday, the number of new infections was the lowest it had been in four months.
In view of this, a similar question is being discussed as in the Netherlands and Great Britain, where infections are currently also declining: Why have the numbers of infections with the highly contagious Delta variant decreased so quickly in India?
What can be deduced from this for European countries in which this mutant is only just beginning to rage?
Is the end of the pandemic in sight?
The immunologist Satyajit Rath from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune immediately puts a brake on this interpretation and this hope on the phone.
He says that such questions are not asked in India.
Nobody doubts that the next wave is coming.
"The numbers are rising again, in the northeast, for example," he says.
The only question you ask yourself is: When will the next peak come?
The hospitals have upgraded for the next situation in terms of the supply of oxygen.
You are a little better prepared this time.
“But prepared enough for what's to come?
I don't think so, ”said Rath.
Many, he says, hope that the vaccinations will cushion the next surge and ease the burden on the health system.
Government misses vaccination target that it has set itself
Three to five million people a day are currently vaccinated in India. That is, and the Indian government likes to sell it, more in absolute terms than in almost any other country in the world. In relative terms, however, in view of the 1.4 billion inhabitants in the country, it is a poor record. The government is almost certain to miss its declared goal of vaccinating the entire adult population - 940 million people - by the end of the year. So far, only about seven percent of Indians have been fully vaccinated, and about a quarter have received at least one dose.
However, with AstraZeneca's vaccine - manufactured by the Serum Institute of India and marketed in the country as Covishield - which is often administered, the protection of one shot is insufficient, especially against the Delta variant.
It is also questionable how effective the local vaccine Covaxin, the Russian Sputnik V or Moderna can protect in the long term.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not deny the danger of Corona from the start.
On the contrary, he had prescribed a tough lockdown for his citizens right at the beginning of the pandemic, when the numbers were still low.
It was clear to him how threatening the virus would hit a health system like the one in India.
However, the lockdown led to an economic collapse, especially for migrant workers and people at the poverty line, the weeks of the standstill became so threatening that now, before a possible third wave, there are also many who are more afraid of another shutdown than of the virus .
"The cure is much worse than the desease" is a sentence that many are convinced of.
The cure is much worse than the disease itself.
How reliable are the data from India?
When people gasped for air on the country's sidewalks in May when the health system actually collapsed, Prime Minister Modi went under.
So after a year and a half of a pandemic, the people in India also have this feeling: Nobody has to hope for the government.
Immunologist Rath says he doesn't think much of concentrating on waves of infection.
“The image of a wave pretends that infections are rising together across the country and then falling again everywhere.
But that's not how these outbreaks work.
They take place in different parts of the country.
In different social groups.
At different times.
Smaller, bigger. "
The problem alone is that there is much less testing in rural areas of India.
It could be that there is an outbreak somewhere in the Indian countryside that does not appear in the current statistics.
The danger of vaccine-resistant variants
The test rates, especially the data in India, most of which comes from the cities, were patchy from the start. Genome sequencing, for example, with which new variants can be found, is still inadequate. There is a lot of discussion about the number of victims in particular. Officially, around 400,000 people have died from the corona virus in India so far. The discrepancy between government numbers and what undertakers, hospital staff and paramedics reported had long been noticed. Now, an independent study by the Center for Global Development in Washington in July comes to the conclusion that excess mortality could be ten times higher, with 4.7 million deaths between January 2020 and June 2021.
The hope of herd immunity is also an illusion, according to the immunologist Rath.
So far, in some areas, half of the people have not had any contact with the virus - so they have not yet been able to build up an immune defense.
Rath believes that the corona crisis might even have been brought under control earlier.
If people had been protected all over the world with the same speed and comparable vaccines.
He worries that the inequality of global vaccination campaigns could create a much bigger problem everywhere in underserved countries and especially in India.
“There are neighborhoods here that are more affluent and where all the people are already fully vaccinated.
Right next to it there are communities in which almost no one is vaccinated.
There the virus can spread super, there are variants.
And these try to infect the vaccinated neighborhood as well.
They fail and fail and fail at the barrier of vaccination protection, again and again.
Until there is a variant and the barrier breaks. "
If that happened, not only India but the whole world would have a huge problem: a vaccine-resistant variant.
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