TS’ herd immunity push boomerangs

The state government’s strategy to push the people towards acquiring herd immunity against Coronavirus appears to be unravelling with the blowback from the disease not just impacting the lives of the common people and the poor, but also government officials and staff who actually do the grunt work in the state administration.

In addition, medical professionals and police officials, some of whom have lost their lives to the disease, are among the victims of this herd immunity plan.

While the government never acknowledged that achieving ‘herd immunity’ by allowing widespread infections was its policy, health department officials had in April, during interactions with some media personnel, had admitted that this was indeed the case.

This was around the time that the state government, citing Indian Council for Medical Research guidelines, said it will no longer test anyone without symptoms even in case of individuals exposed to confirmed Covid-19 patients.

On the one hand, the herd immunity plan appears to be working for the government, with a significant jump in the number of new cases. The strategy was all about letting the disease infect as many people as possible and thereby increase immunity in society. The logic is based on the observation of Covid-19 cases admitted to hospitals where 80 to 90 per cent of patients never exhibited any symptoms and recovered without medical intervention.

The hope has been that this rough statistical estimate would play out in the wider society.

On the other hand, even if this assumption is taken at face value, it still represents a staggering challenge for the state government-run healthcare system.

Of the approximately 3.52 crore population, 80 per cent works out to 2,81,60,000 and 90 per cent to 3,16,80,000.

Medical authorities across the country are unanimous that about five per cent of the rest of the people who show symptoms for Covid-19 will need varying degrees of medical care including critical ventilator support.

This means that even if the government plan of herd immunity works, it would still leave large chunks of the people — 3,52,000 (with 80 per cent asymptomatics metric), and 1,76,000 (with 90 per cent asymptomatics metric) — requiring serious medical care. The herd immunity plan appears to have not taken into account the fact that healthcare givers, the police and government officials are part of the same society and stand to get infected at the same rate as the general public.

With respect to medical professionals, about 170 of whom including doctors from Gandhi, NIMS, Osmania and other government hospitals, health department officials have been quite clear that the medical professionals and others involved either directly or indirectly in Covid-19 patient management did not catch the disease at their place of work, leaving the only possibility of source of infection among medical and police staff being the rest of society. While the concept of herd immunity is fraught with unknowns, it is known that it only works when the allowed spread of the disease is coupled with a vaccination effort from the other end.