Are We Not Missing An Elephant? Epidemiology May Be More Reliable And Our Covid Data Gross Underestimates

Had modern medicine not been introduced in India, about a century ago, we would have relied on our own traditional medicine to cope with the Covid pandemic.

- T Jacob John

India had survived worse calamities of pandemics and famines. The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed several millions but we survived and flourished. So we shall overcome the Covid pandemic also. Those days virology and epidemiology were not available in India or other low income countries.

With modern medicine we learnt virology and epidemiology. We knew through epidemiology that a new respiratory, person to person transmitted epidemic, left to itself, will spread until herd immunity threshold (HIT) is reached and then become entrenched at low ebb as endemic. The HIT of Covid is 60-70%. When half that level is reached the epidemic curve would be at peak, thereafter declining steadily until becoming endemic. Spread over one year, the curve would be not quite bellshaped but like a mountain with roughly symmetrical shoulders.