India failed to prepare for second coronavirus wave: IIM prof

New Delhi: Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad professor Chinmay Tumbe on Sunday said India failed to prepare for the second Covid-19 wave due to the complacency of the government and society, and failure to keep track of the different strains of the virus.

Tumbe, who recently authored the book titled 'The Age of Pandemics: How They Shaped India and the World', further said India will have to be alert for at least two more years to the possibility of a repeated wave of this crisis.

"I think there are two major factors (India's failure to prepare for the second wave). One is, of course, complacency from the government level, from the society level where everybody assumed that the pandemic is over, but serious pandemic rarely gets over in a few months, so that was a big mistake.

"Second is failure to keep track of the different strains of the virus, it's clear that this particular strain that is right now is quite different from the first one," he said.

India is grappling with a spiralling number of Covid cases as well as related deaths, forcing many state governments to put in place restrictions on the movement of people.

Asked what India could have done differently to fight covid-19, Tumbe said if you see what countries like New Zealand and Australia have done, they have been very very slow to go back to full economic activity.

"The fact that a lot of focus on the science behind the pandemic was forgotten in India. For example, Kumbh Mela should not have been allowed because we were not completely out of the woods of pandemic," he said.

A recent survey conducted by CSIR (Council of Scientific Industrial Research), Government of India, has revealed that smokers and vegetarians are less likely to contract Covid-19 infection. The survey suggested smoking may be protective, despite Covid-19 being a respiratory disease, due to its role in increasing the mucous production that may be acting as the first line of defence among the smoking population. It indicated that vegetarian food rich in fibre may have a role to play in providing immunity against COVID-19 due to its anti-inflammatory properties by modification of gut microbiota.

The pan India survey was conducted by an eminent team of 140 doctors and research scientists to study the presence of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, and their neutralization capability to infer possible risk factors for infection. The study assessed 10,427 adult individuals working in more than 40 CSIR laboratories and centers in urban and semi-urban settings spread across and their family members. These people voluntarily participated in the study.

Earlier, two studies from France and similar reports from Italy, New York, and China reported lower Covid infection rates among smokers. A study by America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which examined over 7,000 people who tested positive for COVID-19, also vindicated the above findings. Interestingly, the study found that only 1.3 per cent of survey participants were smokers, compared to the CDC report that 14 per cent of all Americans smoke.