Containing Infection Spreading - Vaccination, The Reason?

We are hearing primarily this, as the reason of containment of spreading the infection, in almost all the media and social networking channels in India.

Is it so?

I was curious, as usual.

So, I pulled up some data.

Graph 1 - Percentage of population who received at least one dose of vaccine

In India, 19.98% (till Jul 2) has been vaccinated at least with one dose.

And, a 4.3% of total population of India has got both the doses, which, according to everyone (WHO, CDC, etc), is the part of the population who are most immune to catch the disease.

Now, let's look at the daily new confirmed cases for India.

Graph 2 - Daily new confirmed cases

If you take a look at graph 2, you will see a sudden drop of daily new cases for India after May 8, 2021.

As we all should know by now, count of confirmed cases can go down only in the following three ways.

1. The vaccines are working, to contain the spread of the infection.

2. The count of tests are going down (without tests, there is no way to know who is positive/infected).

3. Herd immunity is being achieved.

Therefore, considering those three options, does it really seem to you, that a country, with 4.3% of its entire population being fully vaccinated, can contain the daily confirmed cases, and thus the total cases?

Logically, never.

So, the other possibilities are options 2 and 3.

I decided to have a look at the testing data, for option 2.

Graph 3 - Daily tests per M vs Daily confirmed cases per M

The data from graph 3 shows that India has conducted around 1750 tests per million on Jul 2. And India had been doing below 1000 tests per million before Apr 8, 2021.

Now, if you compare that with some other countries shown in the graph, you will mostly see the pattern of "more tests, more positive cases" (UK, Russia, Austria) - right?

At this point, let's have few counter arguments.

Argument 1

USA is also at the similar level with India regarding the test vs daily confirmed case metric. How do you explain that?

The answer probably lies in the vaccination data - USA has fully vaccinated 47% of its entire population against 4.3% of that of India.

Or, may be, they have achieved herd immunity!

Argument 2

Countries like HK or NZ have low vaccination %, high testing rate, but still low daily confirmed cases - how?

Here, the probable reason should be early & effective containment (HK being very densely populated) and/or less population (NZ).

And these countries, as per my knowledge, are not claiming that they have achieved this low daily confirmed cases through vaccination.

So the question is, how can we claim, with only a 4.3% of the total population fully vaccinated, that the decrease of daily confirmed cases is due to the vaccines?

Conclusion

Therefore, the conclusion that we can clearly draw is, based on these data, that the minuscule of population of India being fully vaccinated, it can no way be the reason for decrease in the count of confirmed cases.

The possibilities are that either we are testing less (which we are) or herd immunity is being achieved (which can't be proven by lack of testing).

Early restrictions may be another possibility, as countries with very low vaccinated % also has low daily confirmed cases (like HK & NZ), but that doesn't apply for India, and we all know why!

Note:

There is always another possibility of tampering the data, by the countries' authorities.

Well, I can not tell that for certain, as I have no such proof. And only suspicion can't be stated as a proof.

All the data in this article are sourced from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus, who sourced it from all the Govt/authority published sources those are published online, daily.

All these data are even downloadable from the website, if you want to cross-check it.