In an interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire Prof. Gagandeep Kang said the 3 million total cases India has crossed today and the rate of increase, which is just short of 70,000 per day, is “completely expected”. Given India’s population of 1.38 billion “this is what the trajectory will be”. More importantly, she added “We should expect this to continue for a while”.
Speaking about Delhi, Prof. Gagandeep Kang told The Wire “Delhi has reached its peak for the first wave”. Whilst agreeing that “antigen tests are misleading” and, therefore, “the extent of deceleration in Delhi is questionable because it’s based on antigen testing”, she said she was reassured by other facts that Delhi looks like a good news story. The other facts she mentioned are hospitals, where the number of patients has fallen and they are no longer as full as they were, and the positivity rate, which has steadily gone down. On the 1st of July the positivity rate was 12.2%. It’s now around 7.1%.