‘Lockdown a drastic strategy in fight against coronavirus’

SUNETRA GUPTA, epidemiology professor, University of Oxford

Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiology professor at the University of Oxford, has been among those who have opposed lockdowns for checking the Covid-19 pandemic spread. In an interview, Gupta spoke to Sunetra Choudhury about the lockdowns and India’s low Covid-19 death rate, etc. Edited excerpts:

You have been called Professor Reopen...

I have been called that once because I think that lockdown is a really drastic strategy that has been implemented rather widely without any consideration as to what costs it imposes. I have been pushing for a while now to consider the costs of lockdown and to urge governments to reopen rather than to remain in a state of lockdown, or to keep reimposing lockdowns in the hope of somehow eliminating or eradicating this virus.

Do you think that is true across the world? While some may think it has not been very effective in India, it has been much more so in places like Germany? ...people keep talking about the coronavirus situation on a country by country basis... [it] is nonsensical to compare India to Germany or the UK or to the US or Brazil. It is as if there is a beauty contest going on with who has the least cases, who has done well on a nation-wide basis. It is silly because essentially the virus is spreading on a geographical dimension. I think an explanation for what happened in Europe was that it largely spread quite widely by the time lockdown happened, certainly in the UK. I think what we are seeing now is that places where it spread, where deaths happened, are now protected in the sense that people have built up enough immunity in addition to people who already had immunity. It has created a situation where the virus can no longer spread.i imagine, in India, it is the same where in some parts, it has already spread and many people are immune and in other parts, it has not arrived. We need to look at this on a different scale rather than a countryto-country basis.

I also read that you feel lockdowns hamper immunity...

That was more to say that isolation or lockdown is not one to aspire to go back to because that does set up the conditions for a new virus to come in and find a totally immunologically naive population and wreak havoc just as the flu did in 1918. I was not suggesting that 68 days of lockdown was going to have a significant impact on anybody’s immune system. However, it would have prevented the buildup of immunity in sectors of the population who are not vulnerable. In that sense, that is also a cost.

Would you agree with some, who say the low death rate in India could be due to BCG vaccination?

I doubt it would be the BCG vaccine, which does not even do the job it is supposed to do: protect against TB. If it protects against the coronavirus, that would be something. The virus does not affect everyone equally. There is a vulnerable sector. A large part of that is the very frail, elderly population. So it is a matter of how many elderly you have, and how well you protect them. Maybe we are doing a better job of protecting the elderly.

Can we hope that by the end of the year, we will all have a vaccine?

I think the coronavirus pandemic will end naturally. It will end by becoming a part of our lives like influenza and hopefully with a lower death toll. It is the sort of virus for which it should be fairly easy to make a vaccine. There should be a vaccine by the end of this summer.