That growing feeling of Futility
As on 15th May morning — the total reported corona infected in India crossed 80,000 (1,06,482 cases by late night of 20th May according to worldometer data) cases, despite a total lock down across the country for close to 40 days and then a couple of weeks of partial opening. This is success or failure, depending on which side of the political divide you look at this data from.
A look at the graph of total infections in India shows it is steadily growing, though not exponentially. A standalone look at this graph isn’t a pleasant viewing. In fact, the COV-IND-19 study group had predicted on Mar 22, that In the absence of any intervention, cumulative number of cases in India on March 31 should be 379, on Apr 15, 4836, and on May 15–58643. Even with intervention, there were almost 6,000 cases on April 9 itself and on the 15th we were way ahead of that assessment — 82,000 cases.
On April 27 in a center state meeting on the pandemic — the Government had projected a figure of 65,000 by May 15 — the real figure is at 120% of this projection.
Am I am building a case to prove that the Government has been a failure in managing the COVID crisis.Not yet ! Let’s look at some more data. Attached is the number of days India took to add every next 10,000 new cases. We are now adding 10,000 cases every 2 days. And we took almost 90 days to reach that speed.
If we compare this data to some of the worst affected countries -
- the US took 40 days to reach first ten thousand cases and since then it adds another 10 every two days initially, then every day and now it adds between 30 K and 50 K new cases every day.
- UK took 35 days to reach first 10K cases, 5 more days to add the next 10K and then has settled to approx 2 days for every 10K new cases.
Germany did marginally better taking 50 days to reach the first 10,000 cases and took another 10 days to settle at 2 days for 10000 new cases. - The COV-IND-19 group study also suggests that without the lock down we should have had close to 1.25 Lakh infected cases by now.
So the rate of growth of infections in India has surely slowed down by the lock down. And the government may have used this delay to do some ground work to fight the onslaught of the pandemic.
A total of 855 Dedicated COVID Hospitals have been identified across the country with 1,65,723 Beds (1,47,128 Isolation Beds & rest ICU Beds); 1,984 Dedicated COVID Health Centres with 1,31,352 Beds (1,21,403 Isolation Beds + 9,949 ICU Beds) 343 government laboratories and 129 private laboratory chains. The testing capacity has also been ramped up in both, and as on date, around 95,000 tests can be conducted every day.
So far so good.
Not out of the Woods
The next graph also points out to the fact that India has definitely been better than many advanced countries on account of slowing down the growth of infection but at the same time our flattening of curve has been at best average. There are countries that achieved similar or better performance with much less harsh measures.
Stark questions stare us in the face bluntly in very near future.
Was the near total freeze of life across the nation necessary to achieve this not so major flattening of curve. could we have done with more targeted lock downs & strict implementation of social distancing norms. Did we over commit on lock down as a measure without a thorough cost benefit analysis.
Is it so scary, Really !?
I have been under the impression that Corona virus is a killer — if infected it may lead to millions of deaths, before I looked at this data, that is. Here is a dispassionate look at data of death rates of a selection of countries (which may sound insensitive to few emotionally inclined readers). What this data reveals is educating.
It so appears that a fear psychosis got built up which may not be justified by the data that unfolded. Comparatively, the COVID deaths as a percentage of total annual deaths for all reasons appear to be pretty low. Classic case of getting scared by absolute numbers and failing to see the big picture?
Stated bluntly — India witnesses close to a crore deaths every year and the first quarter deaths due to COVID-19 is just 3000 plus. That is a minuscule 0.0002% of it population. The USA which seems to be rattled by a near one lakh deaths — has lost 0.0278% of its population to COVID, which is just about 3% of annual deaths in the USA.
That’s not all. Look at the broad groups that countries have been divided into. Europe seems to have higher percentage of deaths — while the Americas seem to have the mid range. Asia’s percentage of covid deaths are surprisingly minuscule percentage of total deaths annually, till now. For India, that number is negligible — a 0.03%. Somehow — Asian countries seem to be doing better in resisting the virus. This may in part be explained by the relatively younger population in the Asian subcontinent as is visible in higher percentage of overall deaths in Europe and America being in the 65 plus year group. We now have data that shows that close to 75% COVID deaths in New York happened in the age group of 65+ years.
Even if we annualise the COVID death rate — it does not look scary and hence the pertinent question to ask is whether such a sweeping close down actually benefited us more or the resulting economic impact may harm us more.
What can rock this argument is the fact that — the flattening of curve due to the lock down has delayed the peak infections by a month or two for India. Hence this percentage deaths will most definitely rise higher.
However, the regional trend is unmistakably strong. Also countries with peak COVID related mortality have started showing declining trend. Thus European numbers can be considered the cap for the rise.
It looks plausible then that by maintaing social distancing norms and by ensuring selective lock outs and targeted administrative controls — we could have saved ourselves a huge cost. Countries like Brazil and Sweden took the expert advice and so did not rock their economies the way we ended up doing.
The Social Cost
The sudden and sweeping implementation of a very strict lock down, took the country by surprise and the failure to anticipate the plight of daily wage migrant workers led to an unprecedented migrant worker crisis that has seen the largest migration of people post independence. To just guage the sheer size of this crisis — almost a month late government ran special trains to transport these workers and already 21.5 Lakh people have travelled home in 19 days and the Government is now doubling the number of trains. There is no count of migrant workers travelling in trucks, small tempos, on two wheelers and yes on foot across the country — violating all social distancing norms and facing hunger, heat and tiredness. Hundreds of anecdotes of people migrating is like a photo essay of human misery and pain.
The deaths in this humanitarian crisis is not being tracked — nor will the deaths due to economic recession/depression that may result due to after effects of lock down will be tracked.
On a gut one can feel that we may end up killing more people due to the humanitarian and economic crisis that we may have trapped ourselves into.
The Economic Cost is Yet to be realised
The cost of this lock down is unimaginably high — not many, me included, are able to figure it out objectively. However, to understand the gravity of situation let us emphasize that the economy was in a free fall for the fiscal 2019–20 much before the Corona crisis happened. Here are some high frequency indicators showing the abject rut the economy was in (source — India’s economy was in a rut even before Covid-19 struck — Newslaundry — vivek kaul)
- Car sales down by 24%
- Two Wheeler Sales down by 18%
- Tractor Sales down by 14%
- Commercial Vehicle Sales down by 29%
- Revenue earning rail freight and finished steel consumption was flat
- Non food credit grew by just 6% lowest in 25 years
- Gross tax revenue of the government was also flat with a % decline
Short of aggregate data and estimates — I try and collect some sporadic figures to suggest the intensity of impact of lock down on the economy.
- India Ratings & Research estimates a collective revenue loss of Rs. 971 billion for 21 major states for April 2020 alone, due to the lockdown.
- Services PMI fell to 5.4 in April from 49.3 in March (90% drop)
- Manufacturing PMI fell to 27.4 in April from 51.8 in March (43% drop). This is the sharpest contraction survey’s lifetime of 15 years .
- Composite PMI (both manufacturing & services) fell to 7.2 in April from 50.6 in March (86% drop) (and we do not have April figures yet because the real lock down happened in the months of April-May)
According to data from CMIE :
- Unemployment rate (formal plus informal) has risen sharply from around 7.5% in early March to 23.6% on April 20th
- Labor force participation rate has declined sharply from 42.8% to 35.9%
Most estimates put the loss of GDP over a 45 day lock down to about 10% of the GDP. If we were to recover the loss over the next 10 months — we will need to grow at 12 plus percentage. This is an impossibility — in short, Indian GDP will shrink — negative growth rate — this year. This story is still unfolding.
We may have been fooled into believing that COVID-19 was a juggernaut that was the next big thing after the ice age. In words of eminent journalist editor Shekhar Gupta. Among all the countries hit by the pandemic, India has had the toughest and most decisive action administratively, through a long, complete lock-down. It has also had so far the feeblest, economic response. And the most indecisive. Short of ideas, intent, muhurat?
Well !! the economic response to tackle the COVID crisis is another story — another post — another time. For now, Let’s just accept that we overreacted and simply open up the economy with restricted travel and strict norms for social distancing. Wake and Move on India. Those of you who may disagree do check — in the name of Lock-down 3.0 and now 4.0 the government is actually opening up the lock down.