NEW DELHI: The Delhi-based Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum on Monday said coronavirus is a disease that should be dealt with by epidemiologists but the government is shying away from them since they had challenged the so-called experts' claim of no community transmission despite the tell-tale evidence.
In a statement, they slammed the fallacious claims of ICMR chief Dr Balram Bhargava and NITI Aayog member V K Paul, who is heading one of the anti-COVID-19 groups of the government, on the ‘low incidence’ of the disease, pointing out that Dr Bhargava has nothing to do with contagious diseases as he is a cardiologist.
Dr Paul, on the other hand, is a neonatologist who has devoted his working life to specialising in paediatrics.
Both should have got the epidemiological data vetted by from professional epidemiologists before making such claims, the forum said. It further asserted that their claims are not reliable given that India till date has the lowest COVID testing rates in the world, making the policy formulation based on their conclusions redundant.
Dr Paul and Dr Bhargava have claimed that there have been 0.59 deaths per one lakh population and 20.77 cases.
The forum pointed out that even before these claims were put out in the media, Dr DCS Reddy, the head of ICMR’s 12-member panel of epidemiologists, went on record to say the panel had no access to the study’s findings used by Dr Paul and Dr Bhargava to make their claims. Significantly, the 12-member panel was set up to identify research priorities and align them with the current level of outbreak and response, but it was disregarded, since its members refused to toe the government line.
"This is in keeping with the government's policy of keeping the genuine scientific community at the margins of the COVID policy formulation," the forum said, pointing out that the Reddy-led panel had objected to lack of mention of the samples tested per lakh population by each country, ie the diligence undertaken to detect the cases and document the deaths.
Referring to the data presented on the COVID situation in India as on April 30, the forum said this data has become dated in six weeks that have gone by, particularly in a rapidly evolving pandemic situation, where the slope of the epidemic curve has steepened even further after the lockdown was eased. "Perhaps not worthy of attention for the mandarins was the fact that in countries with which the comparison was made, the epidemic curve had flattened or was even falling after the lockdown," it said.
The epidemiologists in the forum felt it is dubious and mischievous to use all India averages for making misleading claims. They said Dr Paul seems to have forgotten in no time his faux pas – the claim that the new cases will plummet to zero by May 16.
