Read More: ‘This Is Hell.’ Prime Minister Modi’s Failure to Lead Is Deepening India’s COVID-19 Crisis “Even then, the government was largely acting like there wasn’t anything serious going on.” “By early March, it was really starting to be clear, and by late March, we had flashing red lights,” Brown’s Jha says. India’s leaders ignored warning signs in the data and the news of variants circulating in other countries. They were “pristine prey,” as Mukherjee puts it, when the virus resurged this spring.Ĭrucially, this complacency was encouraged by the government’s “mission-accomplished mentality,” Chanda says.
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“It’s equal parts complacency and incompetence.” Many Indians who took strict precautions last year abandoned their masks and gathered indoors when the broader public messaging implied that India had conquered the virus. “It is the virus, but it’s way more than the virus,” says Sumit Chanda, an infectious-disease expert at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in California. Chronic underfunding of the health system over decades has also left hospitals ill-equipped to deal with the surge.įor all those vulnerabilities, experts say the current crisis could have been avoided if the government had acted earlier. The virus moves quickly through the multigenerational households that account for 4 in 10 Indian homes. Other factors are contributing to the surge. Ashish Jha, dean at Brown University School of Public Health. The scale of the current crisis may have been driven by more-transmissible variants, though data are limited because of a lack of widespread genomic sequencing, says Dr. Read More: How the Pandemic Is Reshaping India That optimistic account has since been complicated by two facts: cases are now hitting the young, and also surging in poor, rural states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. A narrative emerged that India may have quietly achieved herd immunity, thanks to its comparatively young population-the median age is 27, and just 6.4% of Indians are over 65-and the fact that 66% of its population live in rural areas, spending most of their time outdoors. India’s economy was one of the hardest-hit in the pandemic, and lockdown was eased in June to allow businesses to reopen.Ĭases peaked around 93,000 per day in September-less than a third of the daily tallies India is reporting this April-and then the curve began to flatten. Modi announced a sudden national lockdown in March, sparking an exodus of migrant workers, hundreds of whom died en route from cities to their hometowns.
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When the pandemic swept the world last year, India braced itself.