Kerala COVID-19 Situation: Two New Analytical Plots Reveal Crisis To Be Graver Than Thought

The Kerala legislative assembly has convened today, 22 July, to debate and determine the affairs of the state. For sure, matters brought up will include illegal timber logging in the hills, the salacious telephonic conversations of a minister, another possible fraud in a cooperative bank, and, of course, l’affaire Pegasus.

Naturally, some lip service will also be offered by the Congress-led opposition on lockdowns, testing and vaccinations, along with the usual trite castigations, as if to tick off boxes. These will be ‘dismissed with disdain’ by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s Communist-led Left Democratic Front government (LDF). In anticipation of this, Marxist apologists have already flooded both social and mainstream media, with esoteric-but-absurd explanations, partly based on serological surveys from December 2020, of how Malayalees are getting more infected in this second wave because they have been more careful.

This is the situation in the state today:

Daily cases in Kerala (red curve in chart above) had stopped declining, to enter into a plateau around mid-June 2021. They then started rising from the end of the month. This rise corresponded with sporadic rises in testing levels (purple curve), interspersed with weekend breaks. As a result, the cumulative positivity (orange curve) remains in double digits, and the TPR (green curve), plateaued for a whole month before rising.

The reason for this unconscionable situation maintaining its fatal grip over both lives and livelihoods in Kerala, for so long, becomes apparent from the chart below:

This is the first of two new charts developed by Swarajya to analyze the epidemic more thoroughly. It plots the percentage daily variations in testing levels over time.

As can be seen, the fluctuations in the Kerala data (red curve) are rather severe. Thus, the first major inference to be drawn is that, testing in Kerala has continued to be both grossly inadequate and severely inconsistent. That is why the state’s TPR remained on a broad for nearly three whole months (purple curve). Atrociously, even after that, the TPR remained firmly in a high plateau for another month, following which it began to rise once again, instead of declining.

Now, there are a number of apologists who say that the gravity of the situation in Kerala is overstated; they substantiate this by pointing out that Kerala, along with Delhi, has conducted the most tests per million.

This is baseless sophistry, and is clearly contradicted by the second new plot developed by Swarajya, below:

This is a dimensionless plot of cumulative positivity versus tests per million, using data of the second wave. The horizontal x-axis plots tests per million, cumulatively; this is a progressively increasing value, as more people in a state get covered by testing.

As is clearly evident, while Kerala may indeed have conducted a laudable degree of tests per million population, the results have unfortunately been catastrophic, because the testing was neither focused, consistent, or of adequate capacity.

On the contrary, look at Uttar Pradesh, the largest, and one of the least developed, states of the union: the response of the state government there was so focused, so fast, and so consistent, that it actually brought UP’s second wave under firm control, even before Kerala’s Communists had either subdued the first wave, or even started tackling their second wave.

The epidemic in UP was already well in control even before testing crossed the ten per cent mark, whereas in Kerala, the crisis is still raging even though tests per million is nearing the 50 per cent mark.

What these two new plots mean, at the end of the day, is that the epidemic situation in Kerala is far graver than people think. No doubt, there will be apologists who point out that Kerala has increased testing levels in the fortnight, or, that the state is headed for a massive testing drive on 23 July, followed by two days of full lockdown. Others may combine the latest serological surveys with Kerala’s high vaccination rates, to obfuscate the actual situation further, and defend the state government’s performance.

As Swarajya has been saying for months now, testing levels in Kerala have to be consistently held at a minimum baseline of 1.5 to 1.75 lakh tests a day at least, for the next three weeks, if there is to be any hope of the epidemic being brought under control swiftly.

If not, then the contagion will linger disastrously within the populace, retain the threat of triggering a national third wave, and most fearfully, aggravate the probability of a fresh strain emerging as a new variant of concern. The history of this epidemic teaches us that the more reproductive space we give to this virus, the more virulently it will mutate.

Thus, if the depressing gravity of the public health situation in Kerala, brought out by these new plots, still does not register with Pinarayi Vijayan and his government, then that incapacity to comprehend would inexorably force the central government to step in and take charge soon. The risks of allowing such inadequacies, inconsistencies and incompetence to flounder any longer in Kerala are too great; India cannot afford it.

(All data from Covid19india.org)