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What is a hypothesis? It is a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation. In the absence of any theory or law to conclusively prove a point, researchers use this handy tool to begin the process of enquiry. Besides being the greatest “natural” calamity, Covid-19 is still the biggest epidemiological riddle for researchers in terms of both its origins and nature. Meanwhile, the world has seen lakhs of deaths, job losses, economic destruction and an uncertainty of the sort mankind has rarely experienced.

The struggle to find out the true nature of the SARS-CoV-2, or coronavirus, continues. No one really knows how it comes, why it comes, when it comes, and, when and why it goes away. If the virus is a natural phenomenon and unique due to its random behaviour, by now the world’s renowned and learned scientists and experts should have found out a METHOD to its randomness. There would certainly have been a pattern to this randomness. However, the reality is that the world has failed to understand the virus’ peculiar behaviour.

This, therefore, gives rise to speculation whether there is some kind of intelligence or a grand design working behind the eccentricities of the coronavirus. It is also grist to the mill for the hypothesis that the virus is rampant due to a leak from the lab where it was stored and then is now being “used”.

Sudden steep drop — both in first and second wave

In the first wave in India, the peak of infections was reached on September 16, 2020, when the daily new infection number touched 98,000. But from that point on the curve of daily infections began to fall steeply. It was almost a vertical drop.  There is no plausible explanation for this. Also remember, at this time there was no lockdown. If we knew what led to this sharp decline in daily infections, then the learning could have been applied during the (worse) second wave, and the much-feared third wave, if it were to materialise.

That the curve was falling sharply even though there were festivals and elections, with hundreds of thousands of people congregating for long hours – Durga Puja (22-26 Oct), Bihar assembly election (schedule was announced on Sept 25, voting was held in three phases on 28 October, 3 November and 7 November), Diwali (14 November), going right up to Christmas (December 25). In spite of all this, the curve kept falling steeply.

This pattern repeated itself in the second wave also. The curve fell almost vertically from a peak of 4.14 lakh daily infections  on May 6, 2021. One might be tempted to ascribe this drop to the lockdown, but then how would that explain the sharp fall in the first wave when there was no lockdown? The herd immunity theory is not applicable as that can only happen when a significant percentage (70% or more) of the population has been exposed to the infection. Even then, the drop cannot be so sharp, can it?

This, I dare say, can only be explained by the hypothesis that is being argued in this article.

Hypothesis: Diminishing potency of the virus

A very limited, informal research of mine shows that at the beginning of the second wave, if one member of a family contracted the virus, everyone in the family was infected. But as the second wave began to wane, from the 3rd/4th week of May, the trend changed. In this period, if one family member got infected, everyone else in the family necessarily didn’t contract the virus.

This can be explained if the hypothesis of Diminishing  Potency of the Virus is considered. Which is that when it is transmitted from a primary carrier to a secondary carrier, and then the secondary carrier to a tertiary carrier, the potency of the virus keeps diminishing. So, possibly when the tertiary recipient gives it to the 4th level recipient, the virus has almost lost its potency to transmit the disease to another person.

Thus, the hypothesis is that the virus loses its potency as it is transferred from the primary, to secondary, to tertiary hosts. If data were collected extensively and analysed by authorities, then I am sure this hypothesis will hold. Because data doesn’t lie.

And if there is merit in this hypothesis, then the steep drop of the curve of daily infections is explained beyond doubt that after getting passed on from human to human, the virus loses its potency and hence after a few levels of transmission it stops being infectious.

The R-naught maths

Now if this hypothesis is right and you marry it with the R-naught math, you would come to the inevitable conclusion that Covid-19 is much more than a natural calamity. In fact, you might lean towards the bio-attack possibility.

So what is this math that forces us to consider such an extreme possibility?

The virus’ ability to transfer the infection to a certain number of people is known in data terms as R-naught. Research estimates  that the R-naught for coronavirus is 5. This means that a Covid positive person can infect five more people. So, if there are five primary infections, then there will be 25 secondary infections. Even if we consider that the virus is still potent enough to spread to next levels, going forward through to the 3rd and 4th carrier, it would infect a maximum of 625 people, of whom 600 are weak, tertiary and 4th level infectors.

Hundred thousand infections to begin with?

The question, therefore, is how could 10 million (one crore) people be infected before the curve dropped sharply? If after the 4th carrier, the virus was losing its potency, to reach total infection of 10 million in the second wave, within the 4th level of transmission, it must have started with at least  about one hundred thousand (one lakh) primary infections. Only then, with an R naught of 5,  about 10 million people would have been infected at the 4th level before the virus lost it potency on further transmission. So, unless there were a hundred thousand primary carriers, with an R naught of 5, this virus couldn’t have spread to the extent it did.

A few people bringing the infection from abroad via flights could not have triggered such a devastating spread, unless, of course, plane loads of passengers arrived with the virus or if a hundred thousand people were infected as the primary spreaders. With international air travel suspended, domestic severely curtailed, this possibility can be ruled out.

How then, did such a large pool of primary spreaders come about?

Was there some sort of compromised/contaminated consignment or some goods and materials that arrived in India? During the first wave, when there was an eruption of infections in Italy, it was directly related to the leather sourced by Italian fashion industry from Wuhan, the origin of the virus. Not only Italy, there are other countries that witnessed sudden eruptions in their first and second waves.

Virus variants and mutations take time in evolving and spreading, they do not happen overnight or at the speed at which the coronavirus has mutated. If the R-naught hypothesis is right and the virus does diminish with every level of infection, then the waves are not innocent ebbs and flows of a natural virus. It points towards foul play, and even the unthinkable…well-planned bio-attacks. And if the hypothesis doesn’t hold, then as of now one cannot reason out the sharp fall in daily infections.

There is possibly more to this than meets the eye

Now, it is up to data scientists, governments, virologists and experts to find out if this hypothesis makes any sense or not. These learned people need to go back a few months and check the data, to find out what happened in Maharashtra and Kerala when the second wave suddenly erupted. Where did the flights, the passengers arrive from? Where did the imported consignments originate from? Everything should be checked and verified. Only then will India, or the world, really resolve the riddle of the marauding coronavirus.

Unfortunately, that is not what experts and governments are doing. At the same time some pundits are busy predicting an impending third wave, almost leading people to believe that there will be a third wave. So, when it hits us, we would be so accepting of it that the last thing that we will focus on is trying to decipher the source and reason. I wonder, if we know so little about the virus, how is it we are so sure the third wave is coming, as if someone somewhere has already planned it.

(The author is CEO of TV9 Network)