Preprint
22 June 2021
John, Denny, Narassima, M S, Menon, Jaideep C, Jammy, Guru Rajesh, Banerjee, Amitava
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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on the global economy and stressed the health care systems worldwide. Measuring the burden of disease on health and economy is essential for system preparedness by way of allocation of funds and human resources.
Methods: The present study estimates Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), Years of Potential Productive Life Lost (YPPLL) and Cost of Productivity Lost (CPL) due to premature mortality and absenteeism, secondary to COVID-19 in Kerala state, India. The impact of disease on various age-gender cohorts has been analyzed. Sensitivity Analysis has been conducted by adjusting six variables with a total of 21 scenarios.
Results: Severity of infection and mortality were higher among older sub-group of patients, and male were more susceptible than female in most of the age groups. DALY for the baseline scenario was 15,924.24...
Journal Article
18 May 2021
Kuppalli, Krutika, Gala, Pooja, Cherabuddi, Kartikeya, Kalantri, S P, Mohanan, Manoj, Mukherjee, Bhramar, Pinto, Lancelot, Prakash, Manu, Pramesh, C S, Rathi, Sahaj, Pai, Nitika Pant, Yamey, Gavin, Pai, Madhukar
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India’s current COVID-19 surge is an unprecedented public health crisis. With exponential growth in the number of daily COVID-19 cases since March, 2021, India reported more than 400 000 new cases daily on May 1, 2021.1 This number is likely to be an underestimate of the true burden of COVID-19 cases, given reports of backlogs of test results, poor access to testing, and many people not getting tested due to fear and stigma.2, 3 Without mitigation, estimates suggest India could reach more than 1 million COVID-19 cases per day with over 1 million cumulative COVID-19 deaths by Aug 1, 2021.4
The Indian Government and health authorities must act fast to flatten this second wave. We strongly endorse the national action plan laid out by The Lancet COVID-19 Commission India Task Force and we have summarised some of their recommendations in the panel
.5 Early in the pandemic, India...
Editorial
6 May 2021
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Last week, Brazil’s total death toll from COVID-19 passed 400,000. In India, the pandemic is taking around 3,500 lives every day and has prompted a global response, with offers of oxygen, ventilators, intensive-care beds and more. Although these two countries are thousands of miles apart, the crises in both are the result of political failings: their leaders have either failed or been slow to act on researchers’ advice. This has contributed to an unconscionable loss of life.
Preprint
29 April 2021
Shrestha, Yogendra, Venkataraman, Rajesh, Moktan, Jeet Bahadur, Chitti, Renukaradhya, Yadav, Shiv Kumar
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Novel Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which is responsible for Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has spread to 220 countries and has been found to be challenging. Many variants detected after Wuhan-Hu-1 reference which were able to develop the resistance against the neutralizing antibodies induced by vaccine and may cause false negative results in diagnostic tests targeting the S gene. The COVID-19 cases are increasing rapidly in India and the government authorized a new vaccine for restricted use in emergency situation. This review discusses about the efficacy, safety, and economical aspects of vaccines authorized in India. The rAd26-s & rAd5-s (Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology) demonstrate high efficacy as well as safety, followed by BBV152 (Bharat Biotech) and AZD1222 (Oxford AstraZeneca); AZD1222 is more economical than...
Journal Article
9 April 2021
Ceballos, Francisco, Kannan, Samyuktha, Kramer, Berber
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In early 2020, the unprecedented nature of COVID-19 prompted India, among many other countries, to put in place stark measures to stem the virus’ spread and the cost of human lives. We analyze data from phone-based surveys on disruptions to agricultural production and food security, administered with 1515 smallholder producers in the states of Haryana and Odisha. We find substantial heterogeneity in how the lockdown affected farmers in these two states, which is likely related to existing structural differences in market infrastructure and to differences in state-specific COVID-related policies. In Odisha, where mechanization is limited, farmers spent more on labor to harvest their crops, and distress selling was more prevalent due to the absence of a well-functioning procurement system for their crops. In Haryana, preexisting market infrastructure allowed the state to sustain...
Working Paper
9 April 2021
Kenneth Lee, Harshil Sahai, Patrick Baylis, Michael Greenstone
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On March 24, 2020, India’s Prime Minister announced the world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown, bringing to a near-halt the economic and social lives of more than one billion Indian residents. This paper quantifies the economic impacts and behavioral changes induced by this unprecedented policy using two unique data sources: Facebook mobility data and a representative sample of previously surveyed low income Delhi households. Compliance with the lockdown was widespread: intra-city movement declined by 80% following the announcement. The economic consequences have been accordingly severe, with income and days worked falling by 86 and 72% respectively. Nevertheless, observance of public health directives was high: mask usage rose by 73 percentage points and handwashing became nearly universal, while time spent outdoors and smoking both declined. We also show how government-provided social...
Journal Article
10 February 2021
Bagepally, Bhavani Shankara,Haridoss, Madhumitha,Natarajan, Meenakumari,Jeyashree, Kathiresan,Ponnaiah, Manickam
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In the absence of specific treatment, preventive strategies are of paramount importance in management of coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) pandemic. We estimated cost-effectiveness of non-pharmacological interventions such as hand-hygiene, surgical-mask N-95 respirators and surgical mask in general population. We performed a decision tree and markov-model based economic evaluation. We estimated total costs and outcomes from public payer’s perspective, based on information available through systematic literature search on relative intervention effect during early pandemic phase. We estimated outcomes as number COVID-19 prevented and Quality Adjusted life year (QALY) over one-year time-horizon with one-day cycle-length. Incremental cost effectiveness ratios (ICER) was calculated multiple sensitivity analyses were applied to assess parameter uncertainty. Use of surgical mask with hand...
Journal Article
6 February 2021
Hussain, Yaseen,Muhammad, Khayal,Umer, Muhammad Farooq,Omarkhail, Abdullah,Khan, Siraj,Kamran, Muhammad,Rashid, Haroon,Khan, Zakir
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A pandemic coronavirus infectious disease-2019 (COVID-19) was first originated in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The entire world was locked down along with China to prevent the local transmission and wide geographical spread [1]. On the 30th of January, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 as public health emergency due to the increasing number of cases around the world [2]. The WHO data on 7 May 2020 showed more than 3588700 confirmed and 247500 death cases of COVID-19 around the world [3]. Taking into account the transmission, morbidity, and mortality of COVID-19, it is observed that most of the developed countries having advanced healthcare systems along with using their innovative research have been failed to cope with COVID-19. On the other hand, developing countries with their struggling and compromised healthcare system are even failed to record the...
Preprint
21 January 2021
John, Denny,Narassima, M S,Menon, Jaideep C,Jammy, Guru Rajesh,Banerjee, Amitava
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Background: From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical practice and research, globally, have centered on prevention of transmission and treatment of the disease. The pandemic has had a huge impact on the global economy and stressed the health care systems worldwide.Methods: The present study estimates Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), Years of Potential Productive Life Lost (YPPLL) and Cost of Productivity Lost (CPL) due to premature mortality and absenteeism, secondary to COVID-19 in Kerala state, India. Details on sociodemography, incidence, death, quarantine, per capita income etc were dervived from various public sources. 5-year age-gender population, working population in each age-gender cohort and corresponding life expectancies were obtained from Census of India 2011. Data on incidence and recovery time were dervied from CODD-K. Details of deaths were...
Journal Article
18 December 2020
Pinchoff, Jessie,Santhya, K G,White, Corinne,Rampal, Shilpi,Acharya, Rajib,Ngo, Thoai D
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On March 24, 2020 India implemented a national lockdown to prevent spread of the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) among its 1.3 billion people. As the pandemic may disproportionately impact women and girls, this study examines gender differences in knowledge of COVID-19 symptoms and preventive behaviors, as well as the adverse effects of the lockdown among adolescents and young adults. A mobile phone-based survey was implemented from April 3-22, 2020 in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar among respondents randomly selected from an existing cohort study. Respondents answered questions related to demographics, COVID-19 knowledge, attitudes, and preventive behaviors practiced, and impacts on social, economic and health outcomes. Descriptive analyses and linear probability regression models were performed for all participants and separately for men and women. A total of 1,666 adolescents and...