Start the schools already

OK, I admit I have a personal interest in this one. Being a double income, single kid, no nanny, nuclear family, we have been incredibly badly hit by the school shutdown for the last nine months. The wife and I have been effectively working at 50% capacity since March, been incredibly stressed out, and have no time for anything.

And now that I’ve begun a “proper job”, her utilisation has dropped well below 50%. This can’t last for long.

Then again, this post is not being driven solely by personal agendas or interests. The more perceptive of you might know that on my twitter account, I publish a bunch of graphs every morning, based on the statistics put out by covid19india.org . And every day, even when I don’t log into twitter, I go and take a look at the graphs to see what’s happening in the country.

And the message is clear – the pandemic is dying down in India. It is a pretty consistent trend. The Levitt Model might not really be true (my old friend’s comment that it is “random curve fitting” when I first came across it holds true, I would think), but it gives a great picture of how the pandemic has been performing in India. This is the graph I put out today.

In most states in India, the Levitt measure is incredibly close to 1, indicating that the pandmic is all but over. However, you might notice that the decline in this metric is not monotoniuc.

However, if you look at the Delhi numbers on the top right, notice how nicely the Levitt metric shows the three “waves” of the disease in the city. And you can see here that the third wave in Delhi is all but over. And while you see the clear effect of Delhi’s third wave in the Levitt metric, you can also see that it coincided with a second wave in Haryana, and a (barely noticeable) second wave in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

This wave was due to increased pollution, primarily on the account of crop burning in Punjab and Haryana in October-November. The reason the second waves in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan (as seen in terms of the Levitt measures) were small is that they are rather large states, and the areas affected by the bad pollution was fairly small.

And along with this, consider the serosurveys in Karnataka (both the government one and the IDFC-sponsored one), which estimated that the number of actual infections in the state are higher than the official counts of infections by a factor of 40 to 100 (we had initially assumed 10-20 for this factor). In other words, an overwhelmingly large number of cases in India are “asymptomatic” (which is to say that the people are, for all practical purposes, “unaffected”).

In other words, we know cases only when someone is affected badly enough to get themselves tested, or has a family member affected badly enough to get themselves tested. And what happened in Delhi and surrounding states in October-November was that with higher pollution, everyone who got affected got affected more severely than they would have otherwise.

Some people who might have otherwise been unaffected showed symptoms and got themselves tested. Some people who might have not been affected seriously enough ended up in hospital. Pollution meant that some people who might have recovered in hospital ended up dying. And as the crops finished burning and pollution levels dropped, you can see the Levitt metric dropping as well.

And lest you argue that I’m making an argument based on a mostly discredited metric, here is the actual number of known cases in the most affected states in the country. The graph is a Loess smoothing, and the points can be seen here.

See the precipitous decline in Delhi (green line) and Karnataka (orange) and Andhra Pradesh (pink) in the last couple of months. The pandemic has pretty much burnt through in most states. We can start relaxing, and opening schools.

You might be tempted to ask, “but won’t there be a second wave when schools reopen?”. That is a very fair concern, since people who have so far been extremely conservative might relatively relax when the schools open. The counterpoint to that is, “irrespective of when you open the schools, there will be a second wave at that point in time“.

It doesn’t matter if we reopen the schools now, or in April, or in August, or in next December. There will always be a few vestigial (possibly unaffected) cases going around, and there will be a spike in known cases at that point. And by quickly dialling up and down, we can control that.

So I hereby strongly urge the state governments (especially looking at you, Government of Karnataka) to permit schools to reopen. A few vocal and overly conservative parents should not be able to hold the rest of the country (or state) to ransom.