India isn't ready for another Covid wave; confidence about impact misplaced

 Without a clear sense of how and where the second wave was most virulent, country can't really figure out what a third will look like.

Memories of India’s devastating second wave of Covid-19 are slowly receding. The pandemic has once again fallen out of the headlines; malls and mountain resorts are crowded with shoppers and tourists. Business activity is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, as it had been just before the second wave hit in March. In fact, just like then, many Indians seem to believe the worst of the pandemic is over.

But we can’t be sure about that at all. Epidemiological models that predicted the second wave suggest that another, shallower wave might hit India as soon as this month. And the country isn’t nearly as ready as it thinks.

Part of what is driving overconfidence is the particularly devastating nature of India’s second wave: The broad spread of infection exposed a huge swath of Indians to the virus, who should thus now have some degree of immunity. Yet the simple fact is that we still don’t know enough about the second wave to make easy predictions about the third.

What we do have is a series of surveys by the Indian Council of Medical Research sampling how many Indians have antibodies for Covid-19. There have been four such surveys, with 29,000 respondents in 700 villages across 21 of India’s 28 states.

Results from the fourth survey, carried out in June and July, suggest that two-thirds of Indians have been exposed to Covid-19, up from roughly 24% in December and January. While that’s a lot, it still leaves 400 million Indians without antibodies. A third or fourth wave might raise the overall death toll sharply.

To make matters worse, we still don’t have a good grasp of how many Indians have died thus far. The federal government claims a death toll under half a million. Some models suggest the real number could be two to three million. Other estimates are even higher.