Scientists raise questions on quality of COVID-19 data flaunted by Centre as infections soar

Mangalore Today News Network

Bengaluru, May 19, 2020: More than three weeks after the Centre made public a presentation showing zero COVID-19 caseload by May 16, India’s daily infection count crossed the 5000-mark, raising serious doubts on the quality of the studies flaunted by the government.

Several scientists DH spoke to are circumspect on various figures and graphs shared by the central government agencies as barely anyone knew anything about the methods used by the government researchers to arrive at such statistics, Deccan Herald reported.

 

A graph shared by NITI Ayog member Vinod Paul - a former professor and Head of the Department at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, here - takes the cake.

It showed a rise in the number of cases till around April 30 after which the projection was for a downward trend and by May 16, the number of cases was shown to be zero.

In reality, 3,970 fresh cases were recorded on May 16 and the number rose to 4,987 the next day. On May 18, as many as 5242 new cases were recorded.

"It was clearly a ridiculous graph from an epidemiological sense. Moreover, the government didn’t say how they arrived at such a graph. No information on the methods used was shared in the public domain" said V Guttal, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and one of the scientists involved in modelling the progression COVID-19 pandemic in India.

"The Integrated Disease Surveillance Project was created for times like this but they are nowhere. The Indian Council of Medical Research is doing something it doesn’t have the expertise to do. With an entire epidemiology institute at the disposal of ICMR, outbreak predictions are being done by a civil servant and a paediatrician with no training in epidemiology. It’s a grand mismanagement," said a senior biomedical scientist who doesn’t wish to be identified.

"The (infamous) graph actually reflects how the government’s interest in COVID-19 as a public health issue dwindled. After May 16 it’s all economy," he added.

The graph was not a standalone example. Other claims made by top bureaucrats were questioned by the scientists tracking the disease.

For instance when environment secretary C K Mishra, who chairs one of the empowered groups on COVID-19, claimed that the COVID-19 curve is being flattened for the country, it was countered by many researchers, who said the disease was progressing exponentially.

"The lockdown has resulted in a much lower growth rate, but it is still growing nevertheless. I don’t think the data supports the assertion that we have flattened the curve. It’s in fact growing exponentially, just at a much smaller rate than before," said Sitabhra Sinha, a professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.

Only a few scientific information has come out from the ICMR institutes dealing with COVID-19 and NCDC. It’s also not known whether any of the Govt institutes are running any disease projection models to guide the policy decisions.

This is contrary to the global trend in which everybody put all scientific information in the public domain as early as possible for the greater common good.

"In war, there is a tactic of misleading the enemy. That tactic is applied in India to confuse the people" said T Jacob John, a retired professor of clinical virology at the Christian Medical College, Vellore.

"I do not know if this style is by design or by default - either way the fact is that the war generals are not sure they are conducting the war well," added John, one of India’s foremost experts on viral diseases.