In early March, India’s health minister, Harsh Vardhan, declared the country ‘in the final’ of the Covid – 19 pandemic.
Mr. Vardhan also praised the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as an ‘example for the world in international cooperation’. From January onwards, India began sending doses abroad as part of its much-vaunted ‘vaccination diplomacy’.
The unbridled optimism of Mr. Vardhan was based on a sharp decline in reported infections. Since peaking at an average of more than 93,000 cases per day in mid-September, infections have been steadily declining. By mid-February, India counts an average of 11,000 cases per day. The seven-day average daily deaths due to the disease have dropped to below 100.
The euphoria of defeating the virus has been building since the end of last year. Politicians, policymakers and parts of the media believed that India was really out of the woods. In December, central bank officials announced that India was bending the Covid infection curve. According to them, there was poetic evidence that the economy was ‘breaking out in the midst of the prolonged shadows of winter to a place in sunlight’. Mr. Modi was called a “vaccine guru”.
At the end of February, the electoral authorities of India announced important elections in five states where 186 million people could vote for 824 seats. Beginning March 27, the polls will span a month, and in the case of the state of West Bengal will be held in eight phases. The campaign started in full swing, without safety protocols and social distance. In mid-March, the cricket board allowed more than 130,000 fans, mostly unmasked, to watch two international cricket matches between India and England at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Gujarat.
In less than a month, things started to unravel. India was in the grip of a devastating second wave of the virus and cities faced new barriers. By mid-April, the country was averaging more than 100,000 cases per day. On Sunday, India recorded more than 270,000 cases and more than 1,600 deaths, both new one-day records. If the orbital infection has not been checked, India could record more than 2,300 deaths each day by the first week of June, according to The Lancet Covid-19 report.
India is now in the grip of a public health emergency. The social media feeds are full of videos of Covid’s funerals in overcrowded cemeteries, crying relatives of the dead outside hospitals, long queues of ambulances snatching patients, morgues overflowing with the dead, and patients, sometimes two to a bed, in corridors and vestibules of hospitals. Wild help is sought for beds, medicine, oxygen, essential medicine and tests. Drugs are sold on the black market and the test results last for days. “They did not tell me for three hours that my child was dead,” says a bewildered mother in one video sitting outside an ICU. Crying from another person outside of intensive care is the silence.
Even India’s huge vaccination effort is struggling now. At first, the deployment was embroiled in a controversy over the effectiveness of a candidate who came home. Even when the country administered more than 100 million doses by last week, vaccine shortages were reported. Serum Institute of India, the country’s largest and largest vaccine manufacturer, said it would not be able to build up the stock before June because it did not have enough money to expand capacity. India had a temporary hold on all exports of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, as the doses were urgently needed at home, enabling the importation of foreign vaccines. Even oxygen would probably be imported now to supply the demand.
Meanwhile, the world’s richest cricket tournament is played almost in a parallel universe, away from death and despair, every night behind closed doors and tens of thousands of people followed their leaders to election rallies and attended the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela. . “It’s beyond surreal, what’s happening,” Shiv Visvanathan, a professor of sociology, told me.
Experts believe that the government has apparently dropped the ball completely on the second wave of infections that would hit India.
In mid-February, Tabassum Barnagarwala, a journalist with the Indian Express newspaper, noticed an increase in new cases in parts of Maharashtra by seven times and reported that samples of the infected were sent for genome sequencing to search for imported variants.
By the end of the month, the BBC reported the boom and asked if India was facing a new Covid wave. “We really do not know what the cause of the boom is. What is worrying is that whole families are becoming infected. This is a completely new trend,” said Dr. Shyamsunder Nikam, a civil surgeon from a district in Maharashtra, said time.
Experts now say that the rumors about India’s exceptionality in the ‘defeat’ of the epidemic – younger population, indigenous immunity, a largely rural population – and the victory of the virus, seem cruelly premature. “As is typical in India, official arrogance, hyper-nationalism, populism and a generous dose of bureaucratic incompetence have put a crisis together,” said Mihir Sharma, a columnist for Bloomberg.
India’s second wave was fueled by people abandoning their hats, attending weddings and social gatherings, and by mixed messages from the government, which made political rallies and religious gatherings possible. With the decline in infections, fewer people took the sample, which delayed the vaccination process, which was aimed at vaccinating 250 million people by the end of July. In mid-February, Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan, tweeted that India “should speed up the vaccination process while the number of cases is low”. No one took complete notice of it.
“There was a sense of triumph,” said P Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “Some felt that we had reached herd immunity. Everyone wanted to get back to work. This narrative fell on many receptive ears, and the few warnings were not heeded,” he said.
A second wave may have been inevitable, but India could “delay or delay it and reduce its impact,” said Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology. Like many other countries, India had to start careful genomic surveillance in January to track down variants, said Mr. Menon said. Some of these variants can cause the upsurge. “We learned of new variants in February from reports from Maharashtra. This was initially denied by the authorities,” Menon added. “It was an important turning point.”
What are the lessons of this public health crisis? In the first place, India must learn not to declare victory over the virus prematurely, and this must put a lid on triumphalism. People should also learn to adapt to short, local closures in case of unavoidable infections. Most epidemiologists predict more waves, as India is apparently still far away from herd immunity and its vaccination rate remains slow.
“We can not freeze human life,” said Professor Reddy. “If we can’t physically distance ourselves in the busy cities, we can at least make sure everyone wears a proper mask. And wears it properly. That’s not a big question.”