Corona Virus in India

In early March, India's health minister Mr. Harsh Vardhan stated the country was "in the endgame" of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr. Vardhan also praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership as an "example to the world in international co-operation". From January onwards, India had started shipping vaccines to foreign countries as part of its "vaccine diplomacy".

Mr. Vardhan's optimism was based on a sharp drop in the reported number of infections. Since a peak of more than 95,000 cases per day on average in September, infections had steadily declined. By mid-February, As India was counting an average of 12,000 cases a day at that time. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from the disease had decreased to below 100 cases.

The joy of beating the virus had been building since the end of last year. Politicians, policymakers, and media believed that India had truly dice with death. In December, central bank officials announced that India was recovering from the Covid-19 infection curve. There was evidence, they said, in very poetic terms, that the economy was "breaking out amidst winter's lengthening shadows towards a place in sunlight". Mr. Modi was praised with the title of "vaccine guru".


At February's end, India's election authorities announced key elections in five states where approximately 185 million people were eligible to vote for 824 seats. Starting from 27 March, the polls would stretch over a month, and in the case of West Bengal, the election will be held in eight phases. All the parties already started Campaigning and now it's at the peak, with no SOP's and social distancing. In mid of March, the BCCI allowed more than 125,000 audience, mostly unmasked, to watch two international cricket matches between India and England at the Narendra Modi stadium in Gujarat.


In just a single month, things began to unravel and nasty. India was in the severe grip of the devastating second wave of the deadly virus and cities were facing lockdowns. By the mid of April, the country was having more than 100,000 cases per day. On Sunday, more than 270,000 cases and over 1,600 deaths, both new single-day sets up a new record. If the runway infection was not checked, India could be facing more than 2,500 deaths every day by the first week of June, according to a report by The Lancet Covid-19 Commission.


India is now in the fists of a public health emergency and the whole country is on high alert. Social media is full of videos of Covid-19 funerals at crowded places, relatives of the dead outside hospitals, long queues of ambulances carrying severely ill patients, mortuaries overflowing with the dead, and patients, sometimes two to a bed, in corridors and lobbies of hospitals. There are frantic calls for help for beds, drugs, oxygen, and tests. Medicines and vaccines are being sold on the black market at many times the higher price, and test results are taking days. "They didn't tell me for 10 hours that my child is dead," a crying mother says in one video, sitting outside an ICU. Wails of another person outside the intensive care punctuate the silences.


Even India's mammoth vaccination effort was now struggling. In the beginning, the rollout had been embroiled in a controversy over the efficacy of a home-grown candidate. Even as the country ramped up the drive and administered more than 100 million doses by last week, vaccine shortages were being reported. Serum Institute of India, the country's - and the world's - biggest vaccine maker said it would not be able to ramp up supplies before June because it didn't have enough money to expand capacity. India placed a temporary hold on all exports of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, because the doses were needed urgently at home, and allowed imports of foreign vaccines. Even oxygen was likely to be imported now to meet the surge in demand.

Meanwhile, almost in a parallel universe, away from the death and despair, the world's richest cricket tournament was being played behind closed doors every evening, and tens of thousands of people were following their leaders to election rallies and attending the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela. "It is beyond surreal, what is happening," Shiv Visvanathan, a sociology professor, told me.

Experts believe the government appears to have completely dropped the ball on the second wave of infections that was about to hit India.


In mid-February, Tabassum Barnagarwala, a journalist with the Indian Express newspaper, flagged a seven-fold rise in new cases in parts of Maharashtra and reported that samples from the infected had been sent for genome sequencing to look for imported variants.

By the end of the month, the BBC reported the surge and asked whether India was facing a new Covid wave. "We really don't know what the cause of the surge is. What is worrying is that entire families are getting infected. This is a completely new trend," Dr. Shyamsunder Nikam, civil surgeon of an affected district in Maharashtra, said at the time.

Experts now say that crowing about India's exceptionalism in "beating" the epidemic - younger population, native immunity, a largely rural population - and declaring victory on the virus turned out to be cruelly premature. "As is typical in India, official arrogance, hyper-nationalism, populism and an ample dose of bureaucratic incompetence have combined to create a crisis," said Mihir Sharma, a columnist for Bloomberg.

India's second wave was fuelled by people letting their guard down, attending weddings and social gatherings, and by mixed messaging from the government, allowing political rallies and religious gatherings. With infections declining, fewer people were taking the jabs, slowing down the vaccination drive, which had aimed to inoculate 250 million people by the end of July. In mid-February, Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan, tweeted that India needed to "accelerate the vaccination drive while the case counts are low". Nobody quite took notice.