How India Brought Down Covid-19 Infection Numbers Before Its Inoculation Drive

Last updated on February 17th, 2021 at 06:49 am

For a democracy as big as India, it is leaving experts foxed about how the number of coronavirus cases might have dropped. They are attributing it to the somewhere genetic makeup of the Indian citizens and some amount of herd immunity that might have actually been responsible for the incredible slowdown in the number of per-day infectious cases.

There were doubts about how the pandemic would affect the world’s second most populated country. It was also a question mark on the fragile medical system that is not as organized as such a big democracy probably should be, and then there is a challenge of the illiterate and migrant population that does not have access to medical care and aid that makes it tougher for the Indian government to have managed the pandemic. 

Cases that were plummeted till September 2020 have now come down dramatically. Even while there is a scare over a new virus variant, India’s infection rates continue to fall to 10,000 per day. 

Cases have been dropping in hospital admissions as well and this has all been in place even before the vaccination drive was started. There are still indications that those who might have developed immunity against one virus might not be able to withstand the variant. But other studies are discovering that the variant will not survive amongst the Asian population.

According to scientists, a deficiency of the protein Alpha-anti-trypsin (AAT) across the populations of Europe and North-America is one of the main factors that explain the rapid spread, that does not affect the Asian population. It is possible that the population has developed antibodies rich in the protein over a period and that has led to a sudden decrease in contraction numbers. 

India has undertaken one of the world’s largest inoculation drives in history and is promising to itself that the whole population will be inoculated by September 2021. The rates of inoculations are slow due to digital glitches but the country at least is not looking outside to vaccinate its population and is richly stocked to take care of its own.