In a conversation with ThePrint’s Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta, Ashish Kumar Jha said India’s Covid testing is inadequate and the number of people infected in the country may be underestimated by upto five times.
Jha, Dean, Brown University School of Public Health talks about the many treatments being prescribed by Indian doctors that don’t work, and how India’s way out of the crisis is scaling up vaccinations. India needs to vaccinate at least 50 per cent of its population to avoid a third wave.
He noted that no other country in the world had run into the same kind of oxygen crisis as India, adding that the situation was ‘shocking’ because the country has such a huge capacity.
Jha also pointed out that this crisis was a fallout of India under-investing in healthcare for a long time.
Jha is also worried about how new variants can arise in India as lakhs of people get infected every day, and said that stopping the spread of Covid-19 is the way to stop new variants from emerging.
