In an interview that contains both good and depressing news, one of America’s foremost epidemiologists, who has closely monitored the trajectory of COVID-19 in India since the start of the pandemic last year, says it does seem that the present Covid surge has reached its peak but is plateauing at a very high level of cases per day.Bhramar Mukherjee, Professor of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Global Public Health at Michigan University, says that two weeks from now (end May/early June) India’s daily increase in Covid cases will be between 150,000 and 200,000. At that point the daily increase in deaths will be 3,000 a day. At the moment the daily increase in cases is 325,000 and daily deaths are just under 4,000.In a 30-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Mukherjee also said that India will see another one lakh deaths over the next month. She also said that by mid-June, the total number of Covid cases will have reached 30-32 million. She said hospitals would remain full in May and June.Prof. Mukherjee told The Wire that the situation would return to what it was in February – before the present surge began – only in July and August. That is when she believes the present surge will peter out.Asked by The Wire what she believes is the actual death toll, because no one in the country believes either the official daily count or the official total count, Prof. Mukherjee said that she believes the actual total number of deaths is likely to be between 1 and 1.25 million. In earlier interviews, she has said India is undercounting deaths by a factor somewhere between 2 and 5. That she said was true of wave one. Now, in wave two, India is undercounting four-five times and, therefore, the present official death toll of nearly 270,000 is actually likely to be between 1 and 1.25 million.In one of the most emphatic answers in the interview, Prof. Mukherjee said it was “a joke” that the Indian government still refuses to accept there is community transmission in India. The latest report, put out by the WHO on May 11, shows that India refuses to classify itself as a country with community transmission and insists on the lower and less serious classification called ‘cluster of cases’. Prof. Mukherjee said this has “no semblance of scientific credibility”. She says India’s scientists must speak out against this. She also said: “I challenge the government to trace even 5% of the millions of cases in India”.However, Prof. Mukherjee agreed that the situation in Maharashtra and Mumbai, in particular, as well as Delhi are clearly good news stories.She said the R value in Maharashtra has dropped from 1.7 in March to 0.8. She says by the end of May the daily increase in cases in Maharashtra will be down to 10-15,000 a day.Speaking of Delhi, Prof. Mukherjee said the picture was slightly less clear than Mumbai because Delhi’s testing levels are not as high as they should be. Even so, she forecasts that by the end of May the daily increase in cases will be 1,000.However, Prof. Mukherjee emphasised that India must not declare premature victory because it still has an astonishingly large number of cases every day. She also said that she “emphatically” does not believe the number of cases officially recorded. It’s much much higher.The above is a paraphrased precis of Prof. Mukherjee’s interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire. Please see the full interview for a better understanding of Prof. Mukherjee’s views.