Please Dr. Dixit, I think you should stop saying we have ‘immunity’ advantage. Because, we don’t know.
I have been following your tweets regarding our immunity, importance of herd immunity and climate favoring to our low death rates. https://twitter.com/smadixit/status/1292681936943460352">https://twitter.com/smadixit/...
I have been following your tweets regarding our immunity, importance of herd immunity and climate favoring to our low death rates. https://twitter.com/smadixit/status/1292681936943460352">https://twitter.com/smadixit/...
1. It is known that virus maybe asymptomatic in anywhere between 80-85%. This maybe due to younger age, no/lesser comorbidities & ?cross-immunity from past infection. I believe this would be same for Nepali population, but not because we have increased immunity.
2. Estimating death due to Covid-19 is tricky if we don’t have strong community testing/contact tracing- it becomes impossible to estimate what proportion of population are dying due to Covid-19? It is also important to mention that we just expanded our screening guidelines.
3. Herd immunity is great and probably is a way to live with virus. However, knowing how easily our health system gets overwhelmed (based on number of beds in hospitals for our population, ability of hospitals to handle Covid-19, and availability of ventilators) +
We should be more strict with all social distancing guidelines because clearly it works- ‘flatten the curve’.
4. Argument regarding our lower infection rate and mortality vs other nations is flawed because our poor connectivity to outside worlds unlike developed nations(blessing in disguise). I have reservations regarding our ability to keep accurate databases as well.
I do think we did a great job by sealing the borders early.
If we don’t acknowledge the frailties of our health system and plan based on its capacity, we are moving towards a disaster as people may simply die due to unavailability of supplemental oxygen.
If we don’t acknowledge the frailties of our health system and plan based on its capacity, we are moving towards a disaster as people may simply die due to unavailability of supplemental oxygen.
It may have been ~8 months to this pandemic and thus may give us false sense of security that we have been able to ward off this disaster, I think we also need to acknowledge that we simply didn’t have enough Covid-19 cases in the community until now.