In Part 1 of this post on Uttar Pradesh (UP), I introduced the people responsible for UP’s “Test, Track, and Treat” program and reviewed its evolution into the most pragmatic, comprehensive, and successful health system response to COVID in the world.
As you can see below, after the “First Wave,” by January of 2021, India had “gone quiet,” given that COVID death rates per 100,000 plummeted across the country, with most states having very low rates of reported deaths as seen below to the far right of the graph (ending just before the Delta wave starts to form):
Then the new “Delta” variant began to escalate in Lahore, Pakistan in mid-February. A month later Delta began to escalate in the adjacent Punjab region of India and then onto nearby Delhi where the city started to get hammered. Delhi experienced the worst outbreak in the country, with 50% higher rates of death than its nearest neighboring city. It then spread to Mumbai in mid-southwest India which implemented lockdowns causing massive numbers of migrant workers to begin fleeing Delhi to go back to their hometowns. The reason why they fled is because they remembered what happened during the 2020 lockdown in Mumbai and Delhi where they couldn't work and they couldn't be with their families. As you can see below, Uttar Pradesh is the home of millions of migrant workers, particularly those working in Mumbai and Delhi.
So UP started to get hit, and hard. They went from 300 cases a day on March 19th (umm, out of 231 million people) to 2,589 on April 2nd, then to almost 40,000 by April 27th. Note that the United States of Pharma (USOP) would love to see just 40,000 cases a day.
The reason why it looked like the above is because the massive surge was met with an aggressive response by UP’s “Team-11.” First, they increased the number of health care workers to more aggressively perform testing throughout the state. They ended up deploying 400,000 health care workers in 141,610 teams along with 21,242 supervisors within a structure of 60,000 “surveillance committees.” As detailed in this news article, they had already been distributing 1 million ivermectin doses bi-weekly to over 1 million Health care workers since August 2020. The teams then proactively visited homes, testing covid-symptomatic individuals using Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) kits; those who tested positive were isolated and given a medicine kit containing ivermectin with clear-cut instructions. They also began screening all incoming migrants at bus stations, airports, and train stations. By May 15th, they had conducted 43 million tests.
Although their case rate was one of the highest in India during the massive migration, note that their death rate per 100,000 was one of the lowest in India as seen below (I again highlight Kerala as a comparator, for reasons you will learn about (essentially because they responded to the Delta wave with mass vaccination and avoidance of ivermectin):
So how did they accomplish such a low death rate compared to cases? Well, on April 17th, UP’s government released a list of 7 medicines, published in a major newspaper, giving clear instructions on how to treat patients with COVID. In particular, they advised giving ivermectin after food which we now know leads to much higher concentrations of ivermectin. I also loved their guidance about drinking enough water and getting enough sleep.
Most importantly, the RRT teams spread out across UP, visiting 97,000 villages, testing widely, prophylaxing close contacts, and treating those ill with ivermectin.
The cases started to drop precipitously. Based on data from Johns Hopkins University, on April 26th they had 33,531 cases which decreased to 18,023 by May 12. Then on May 30, the cases dropped to just under 600 cases a day. Again, we are talking about a state with 231 million people performing massive testing. Only 600 cases a day. While the rest of India was still raging with Delta.
On May 10th however, although the Hindustan Times also reported on the amazing turnaround in UP, detailing the steep drop in cases, the high recovery rate of cases, and one of the lowest positivity rates in the country, they do not mention ivermectin.
The insane censorship of mentioning ivermectin as part of UP’s program begins in earnest (and will get worse, a lot worse). What is even more tragic is the beginnings of the attempt to credit UP’s turnaround to vaccinations. Absolute nonsense.
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