If anything, the data suggests the contrary. They were testing people extensively in Haridwar when the event took place. The cases that were detected from the city during the time the festival was happening represented less than 1% of the total number of cases happening in India.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/coronavirus-over-1700...

> Medical workers conducted 2,36,751 tests over the five-day period in the mela site. Out of these, 1,701 came out positive for coronavirus.

For context, at this time, India was already registering over 200,000 new covid cases a day. The test positivity rate (<1%) from the mela site is also much lower than most other parts of the country (~5-10%).

Basically, covid had already spread so much in India by the time Kumbh Mela happened that the cases from there were only a drop in the bucket.

COVID has an incubation time of 7-14 days.

Why would people be positive at the event?

The amount of nonsense data coming out of India is just ridiculous.

> COVID has an incubation time of 7-14 days.

That's for symptoms. Covid is usually expected to show up in tests after 4-5 tests.

>Why would people be positive at the event?

The Kumbh Mela is not a one-day event. The event had already been underway for 10 days for the period under discussion.

In any case, testing data is available from Haridwar for the entire month now. Is this a fourth mutant of Covid that never shows up in tests?

No there's no such study. There has been a lot of focus on election rallies and Kumbh Mela in press, but it seems to be mostly due to people turning the tragedy of the second wave into a political opportunity to attack Modi. But Kumbh Mela is one event, and elections are only taking place in a few states. The reality is that India was handling the pandemic quite well through a policy of highly localized containment, and general mobility among the populace was increasing in response to improved pandemic conditions and the trickling of vaccines (although India gave away tens of millions of vaccine doses to other nations and hurt its own drive as a result of that generosity). I suspect that the reality of this wave is that many factors contributed - increased general mobility, some large events, and likely new variants that aren't well understood yet and may spread more easily. Prior to that, everything and everyone being blamed right now is just speculative and opportunist.

> But Kumbh Mela is one event, and elections are only taking place in a few states.

Kumb mela gathers tens of millions of devotees at a single point in the most densely populated state in the sub continent.

Just on April 14th 2021, more than 900,000 people taking a dip in the same river. The central government is the authority responsible to stop the event this year given the impending crisis, but only encouragement was seen from the ministers except that the event was cut short to 30 days instead of the many month ordeal it usually is.

> There has been a lot of focus on election rallies and Kumbh Mela in press, but it seems to be mostly due to people turning the tragedy of the second wave into a political opportunity to attack Modi.

> everything and everyone being blamed right now is just speculative and opportunist.

This thread is a testament to the aggressive brigading to deflect all blame from the Central Government. Contrarians spewing random questions to avoid focus on anything being discussed. It has been a pattern for the past half a decade now.

Nobody is denying that there are multiple factors and people responsible in the current crisis, but this line of excuses is a steady pattern of a concerted effort to deflect blame on the untarnishable image of a strongman Modi emanates. It happens on every crisis. every blunder Modi makes.

But Maharashtra had been seeing record cases even before Kumbh which happened in Uttar Pradesh. How come Maharashtra had those cases then?

The data suggests that Covid had already become so widespread in India by the time Kumbh happened that the few thousand of cases happening represented only a tiny fraction of cases in India.

Of course, after you point his out, the pièce de résistance comes out, calling the data itself fake based on no argument at all.