The government would like to claim that the lockdown has “saved lives”. But in this article for the Wire, I tried to explain why it makes no sense to gauge the efficacy of the lockdown by blindly comparing the current number of cases to the number obtained by extrapolating the early rates of growth. The final toll of the pandemic is almost entirely controlled by its rate of spread after the lockdown ends, not its rate of spread during the lockdown. So the correct question is whether the lockdown has put the country in a position where it can keep this rate of spread low after the lockdown ends. The data suggests otherwise. A simple calculation comparing the number of recorded deaths to recorded cases suggests that a large number of active cases remain undetected, and so contact-tracing cannot succeed. Most seriously, the long-term rate of spread is controlled by whether people can sustain physical-distancing measures and other precautions. But, because the welfare of people was relegated to an afterthought, the lockdown has made it harder for people to implement precautionary measures, which might otherwise have been manageable. https://thewire.in/government/indias-lockdown-has-failed-heres-what-we-can-learn-from-it