In a 40-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire Prof. Dileep Mavalankar was asked whether this means that Covid-19 is not as infectious a disease as we thought. In reply he said whilst that is one explanation he inclines towards the belief that the results show that everyone is not automatically susceptible to the disease. As he put it: “We need to rethink about the susceptibility of individuals to this virus”. As Prof. Dileep Mavalankar put it this means: “A lot of us are a lot safer than we thought we would be.”
Prof. Dileep Mavalankar told The Wire that his findings corroborate and seem to confirm the ‘immunological black matter’ theory propounded by Karl Friston, a neuro-scientist at University College London, who has argued that perhaps as many as 50% of any population do not become susceptible to a virus because of such factors as cross immunity and geographical isolation.