What India can learn from 2 years of Covid curbs
India was not the first country, and nor was it the last, to impose such unprecedented restrictions to control a fast-spreading global outbreak about which scientists knew very little at the time.
Thursday marks two years since India went into a hard lockdown to slow the rate of Covid-19 infections. For many Indians, March 24, 2020, marks the start of the day when a global pandemic entered their lives for the first time. The two years since are likely to go down as one of the toughest periods in the lives of many, one that brought about lifestyle changes including some that may end up being permanent.
India was not the first country, and nor was it the last, to impose such unprecedented restrictions to control a fast-spreading global outbreak about which scientists knew very little at the time. To understand how lockdowns changed behavioural patterns throughout the world, starting April 2020, Google began publishing Covid-19 “Community Mobility Reports” that offered insights into how several aspects of billions of lives staggered to a halt and then slowly resumed again.
These reports relied on anonymised location data to generate aggregated mobility trends over time across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential areas, spread across a wide variety of geographies. These trends were presented as a deviation from the baseline of pre-pandemic activity – for this, Google took the median day-value from the five-week period in January 2020 (January 3 to February 6).
By doing so, this data ended up providing clear insights on how two years of the pandemic have been shaped by human activities (or the lack thereof).
Restrictions and restricting waves
In the two years of India’s pandemic journey, the country has experienced three distinct waves of infections – each behaving differently. Looking at the case curve (seven-day average of new infections in India) in these three waves, a stark difference is visible in their nature.
The first wave, which started March 3, 2020, peaked on September 16, 2020, taking close to 200 days from start to peak. It was the most prolonged of the three, but even at its highest, the case curved only touched 93,617 – the lowest of the three peaks.
This long, flat nature of the first wave is explained if we look at the mobility figures from the same time. At the start of March, average mobility across five segments– retail, grocery, parks, transit and workplaces – was barely above the baseline (around 1.5% higher). To be sure, Google also provides mobility data for residential activity, but it has an inverse relation with lockdowns (it goes up, instead of dropping during lockdowns), so that has been excluded from the average taken here.
As the lockdown was enforced on March 24, 2020, mobility dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded throughout the two years of the pandemic ( -67.8%) on March 25, 2020. And while a slow gradual unlocking commenced from June, curbs of varying degrees remained in place through much of 2020 – visibly in the gradual rise of the mobility curve.
By early 2021, it looked as if India was set to resume normal life – by mid-March mobility was just 4-5% off baseline, the highest it had been since the lockdown.
Then, the second wave hit.
The horror of India’s second wave was everything that the country sought to prevent when it screeched to a halt a year before. Through April and May 2021, cases and deaths soared to unprecedented levels as hospitals choked with infected people, morgues ran out of space, and cemeteries ran out of firewood to burn the dead or space to bury them.
To arrest this gargantuan spread of infections, governments (state and centre alike) again rushed to reintroduce curbs – forcing mobility to drop again for the first time since the start of the March 2020 lockdown. By the time the second wave could be contained, India again found itself back to mobility levels last experienced by the country in May 2020, weeks after the start of the first lockdown. A full year’s crawling back had been undone within weeks of the second wave.
... but here is where the recovery started.
Following the containment of the second wave, which provided natural immunity to close to three quarters of the population (as per the government’s sero-surveys), and buoyed by an expanding vaccination drive, Indians started resuming activity en masse. The recovery in activity was such that by August 11, just three months since the second wave peaked, Google mobility trends turned positive for the first time – meaning that normal pre-pandemic activity returned.
It didn’t stop there. In the months that followed, mobility levels soared way past the pre-pandemic baseline – going as high as 20% through the December holiday season.
But 2021 ended under the shadow of a new variant of the Sars-CoV-2: Omicron. A much-faster spreading variant – it was far less virulent, and thus much less likely to cause death, especially among the vaccinated (which close to 90% of the country’s adults were at that point of time). The case curve that resulted from this variant was sharp, and the rise of infections was dizzyingly quick, but receded just as quickly.
Even as case numbers soared far past the first wave and closed in on the brutal second wave, due to a combination of three factors – the widespread application of vaccines, the relatively milder disease caused by Omicron, and scientists over two years simply learning how to administer care for Covid better – India’s third wave caused next to no disruption of life. Even at its worst, mobility never consistently dropped below pre-pandemic levels – meaning there was never a need to halt daily life to combat this surge. By the third week of March, daily life had resumed, and activity was close to 40% above pre-pandemic levels.
And in that , the third wave ended up providing India with the clearest sign yet that the world can live on with the virus. Immunity, likely through vaccines and/or past infection, is the single element that will ensure that people of the world never go back to March 24, 2020.
And in maintaining this immunity also lies the key for people and governments alike for what will set the groundwork for coming months and years. Right now, the question to ask is not whether India will face a fourth wave (which it most likely will), but how to minimise disruption of life through all future waves.
Based on latest studies, vaccine-induced immunity starts fading around the six-month mark. This adds to the argument that India must make available booster shots to everyone over 18 years of age. Currently, only those over 60 are eligible for boosters in India.
And while the Omicron wave may have bought India some time in terms of natural immunity, two years of the outbreak have shown us that the virus isn’t going anywhere soon. So India (and the world) must equip itself with the best immunity to live alongside it.
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