THE FACT IS, SHASTRI WAS WRONG ON COVID

ONE of the reasons Jonathan Van-Tam and other medical experts spend endless hours countering misinformation around Covid and vaccines is that so much is allowed to go unchallenged.

Take the views of Ravi Shastri, India coach and the man whose book launch is suspected to have contributed to the Covid outbreak that gave this summer’s tourists the chance to scoot for the border and the IPL. Shastri was asked if he feared being made a scapegoat for the curtailed series. ‘They tried to make it that way,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t worried because incubation probably takes weeks. There were about 250 people there and no one got Covid from that party. I’ve not got it at my book launch because it was on August 31 and I tested positive on September 3. It can’t happen in three days.’ But Covid incubation does not take weeks. We know this. That is why healthcare professionals set quarantine periods at 10 days. We also know infection can happen in a matter of days and in extreme cases as little as 48 hours after contact. The average incubation is five days, meaning Shastri could have got Covid at his party, or certainly been contagious then, having contracted the virus previously. Yet, too often, we let distortions or outright ignorance pass unchallenged. The first casualty of letting everyone tell their truth is the truth. And where Covid is concerned, it truly matters.