As the month of June comes to an end, a natural propensity for any citizen will be to know where exactly the country stands now in the ongoing battle against Covid-19. To tell facts, the situation is quite alarming, if not overwhelmingly so. There had been several rounds of battle against the virus since it made its presence felt in the country, including the great lockdown and there has been a near unanimity that it has acted as a ‘bumper’. But, real respite is still a far cry, as India at the moment is nowhere from what is now widely known as the ‘flattening the curve’ objective. Cases are rising exponentially and large numbers of daily deaths have now become unavoidable. It is a critical juncture now and certainly not the moment to discover ‘solace’ just due to an improvement of the recovery rate. The way the graph of daily additions is rising which is now in the range of 18000-20000, is a good indicator that the journey towards the peak, the most feared aspect of the pandemic, presumably, has just started. This round of the war is going to be much tougher it had been during April-May, as the most actively-used weaponry, i.e. the lockdown has been lifted largely in most parts of the country, except for the places where concentration of cases and casualties are showing no signs of ebbing away.

Besides the deleterious qualities of the virus in causing harm to the infected person, the other notable aspect is its unpredictability. There have been many instances where even after lessening of caseloads in a particular region or state and just when the medical experts were about to announce that the danger period might be over, there had been a resurfacing. This is indeed a new challenge to the science of virology and cutting the clutter is increasingly becoming an onerous task. The phrase ‘one step forward, two steps back’ can appropriately describe the current overall national picture. If Delhi has seen a marked decrease of daily cases over the last few days, in Tamil Nadu, this ‘gain’ has been erased by newer additions, taking the country’s Covid picture in its entirety back to square one.

The gravity of the situation can be understood by the fact that over the last six days one lakh new cases have been added which otherwise is a grim reminder that there is nothing to cheer over the current recovery rate which stands at 58.67%. There is also a necessity to increase the testing rates from the current one, the first step of the battle as reiterated by the WHO over countless times.

July will be thus extremely crucial and if the country passes the test, it can be said that a good part of the battle has been won.