1/ Indians must have no confusion about how we reached impressive Covid herd immunity: "India’s masses didn’t have the luxury to ‘work from home’ and follow social distancing, but they might have silently built India’s herd immunity" https://theprint.in/opinion/indians-must-have-no-confusion-about-how-we-reached-impressive-covid-herd-immunity/591489/

2/ It is understandable why the health ministry is hesitant to talk about the scale of Covid-19 spread, although many of its own experts seem to agree that majority Indians have probably been infected with coronavirus and developed immunity response as a result.

3/ Most of these infections were presumably asymptomatic or of mild nature, and recovered on their own...(Sero)surveys showed that for every ‘case’ count in India there are 50+ undetected infections that were mostly cured on their own, presumably due to natural immunity response

4/ as time passed, people realised that Covid-19 was not as risky as it was made out to be. Most of the initial casualties were due to institutional quarantine facilities or hospitals that themselves became hotspots.

5/ There was also a realisation, especially among the poor, that this was a pandemic for the rich and fearful who stayed indoors in their air-conditioned rooms, as it became evident that the virus was much less likely to spread in open spaces

6/ The above factors must have contributed to the widespread of Covid-19 across the Indian population, despite the lockdowns and partial ‘unlock’ phases.

7/ While the government increased its testing and counting of cases, the actual number of infections razed through the population by a factor of 50 times or more, as serological test results on a large-scale, sporadic sero-surveys, and mathematical modelling showed.

8/ No government would want to accept that lockdowns were a terrible idea and that wider spread of the pandemic could result in the build-up of herd immunity and fewer number of deaths.

9/ However, it must be kept in mind that governments can neither be blamed nor credited for the spread of the coronavirus, because it was nature at work.

10/ Thanks to the immunity brought on by nature, daily deaths related to Covid have come down to approximately 200 from the peak of around 1,200.

11/ Unless we are to believe that recent phases of ‘Unlock India’ led to further suppression of the virus, or our medical establishment found some wonder cure that the world doesn’t know about, nothing else can explain the falling number of deaths.

12/ it is the inability of our poor masses to follow the lockdown restrictions and social distancing norms that may have silently built India’s herd immunity to a large extent, even before the vaccines came in