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

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.

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.