NEW DELHI: India has data on Covid deaths but it doesn’t have statistics to establish which vaccine prevents hospitalisations, said India’s top virologist Dr Gagangdeep Kang.
The country needs a good database to analyse and measure what interventions are required to tackle public health problems, she asserted.
“Data is important because we need to be prepared for future pandemics. Data will give us an idea about what needs to be done next,” she told this newspaper.
“Does any Covid vaccine we have, prevents hospitalisation across all parts of the country? That data is not currently publicly available. Data on deaths is available, but not hospitalisation. Making sure that data systems are functional is very important.”
The top virologist said that she would like to see data that under various categories such as age, co-morbidities, hospitalisation, urban-rural differences, social-economic status.
“All of these are important for the future. We should have had them,” she said, adding that the issue with public health is data.
“If you can’t measure a problem, it doesn’t exist. We had this issue well before the pandemic. Citing an example of the need for data, she said in 2016, India reported 4,000 Cholera cases to the WHO. But one hospital in Kolkata recorded 20,000 cases of cholera the same year."
“So we have a problem with how we collect data and how we report data. This is not new to the pandemic.’’