In early March, Indian Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said the country was “at the end” 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”. Beginning in January, India began delivering doses to foreign countries as part of the much-lauded “vaccine diplomacy.”
Mr Vardhan’s unbridled optimism was based on a sharp decline in reported infections. From a peak of over 93,000 cases a day, on average, in mid-September, infections have steadily declined. In mid-February, India averaged 11,000 cases a day. The seven-day average of daily deaths from the disease fell below 100.
The euphoria over the defeat of the virus had been building since the end of last year. Politicians, policy makers and parts of the media believed that India had really come out of the forest. In December, central bank officials announced that India was “bending the curve of Covid infection.” There was evidence, they said, in poetic terms, that the economy “bursts in the middle of the long shadows of winter to a place in the sunlight.” Mr. Modi has been called the “vaccine guru.”
In late February, India’s electoral authorities announced key elections in five states with 186 million people eligible to vote for 824 seats. Starting March 27, the ballot boxes will run for a month and, in the case of West Bengal, will take place in eight stages. The campaign had started in full swing, without safety protocols and social distancing. In mid-March, the cricket board allowed more than 130,000 fans, mostly unmasked, to watch two international cricket games between India and England at Narendra Modi Stadium in Gujarat.
In less than a month, things started to go well. India was in control of a second devastating wave of the virus and cities were facing fresh blockades. By mid-April, the country had an average of over 100,000 cases a day. On Sunday, India recorded more than 270,000 cases and more than 1,600 deaths, both new records in a single day. If the infection on the runway was not verified, India could record more than 2,300 deaths each day by the first week of June, according to a report by the Covid-19 Lancet Commission.
India is now in the grip of a public health emergency. Social media feeds are full of videos of Covid funerals in crowded cemeteries, crying relatives of the dead outside hospitals, long queues of ambulances carrying panting patients, graves spilling over the dead and patients, sometimes two on the bed, corridors and hallways . There are frantic calls for help for beds, medicine, oxygen, essential medicines and tests. The drugs are sold on the black market, and the test results take days. “They didn’t tell me for three hours that my baby was dead,” says a dizzy mother in a video sitting in front of an intensive care unit. The grief of another person outside of intensive care points to the silences.
Even the mammoth vaccination effort in India is struggling now. At first, the launch had been implicated in a controversy over the effectiveness of a cultured candidate in the country. Although the country has accelerated its momentum and delivered more than 100 million doses by last week, vaccine shortages have been reported. Serum Institute of India, the largest vaccine manufacturer in the country and in the world, said it will not be able to increase supply until June because it does not have enough money to expand capacity. India placed a temporary detention on all exports of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine because the doses were urgently needed at home and allowed the import of foreign vaccines. Even oxygen was likely to be imported now to meet growing demand.
Meanwhile, almost in a parallel universe, far from death and despair, the richest cricket tournament in the world was played behind closed doors every night and tens of thousands of people watched their leaders at election rallies and participated in the Hindu festival. from Kumbh Mela. . “It is beyond surrealism, what is happening,” Shiv Visvanathan, a sociology professor, told me.
Experts believe that the government seems to have completely dropped the ball on the second wave of infections that was about to hit India.
In mid-February, Tabassum Barnagarwala, a reporter for the Indian Express, reported a sevenfold increase in new cases in parts of Maharashtra and reported that samples from those infected had been sent for genome sequencing to look for imported variants.
By the end of the month, the BBC had reported the rise and asked if India was facing a new Covid wave. “We really don’t know what the cause of the growth is. What’s worrying is that whole families are getting infected. This is a completely new trend,” said Dr. Shyamsunder Nikam, a civilian surgeon in an affected district of Maharashtra. time.
Experts now say that singing about India’s exceptionalism in “defeating” the epidemic – a younger population, native immunity, a largely rural population – and declaring victory over the virus has proved cruelly premature. “As is typical in India, official arrogance, hyper-nationalism, populism and a large dose of bureaucratic incompetence have combined to create a crisis,” said Mihir Sharma, a Bloomberg columnist.
India’s second wave has been fueled by people who have let their guard down, attending weddings and social gatherings and through mixed messages from the government, allowing for political rallies and religious gatherings. As infections declined, fewer people took blows, slowing the vaccination push, which aimed to inoculate 250 million people by the end of July. In mid-February, Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan, wrote on Twitter that India must “speed up vaccination while the number of cases is low.” Nobody noticed.
“There was a sense of triumphalism,” said Fr Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “Some felt that we had obtained the herd’s immunity. Everyone wanted to return to work. This narrative fell on many receptive ears, and the few precautionary voices were not heeded,” he said.
A second wave could have been inevitable, but India could have “postponed or delayed and diminished its impact,” said Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology. Like many other countries, India should have begun careful genomic surveillance in January to detect variants, Mr Menon said. Some of these variations could cause growth. “We learned of new variants in February from the Maharashtra reports. This was initially denied by the authorities,” Menon added. “This was a significant turning point.”
What are the lessons of this public health crisis? First, India should learn not to declare victory over the premature virus and should cover up triumphalism. People should also learn to adapt to short, local blockages in the event of future peaks of infection. Most epidemiologists predict more waves, as India is clearly still a long way from reaching its immunity and vaccination rates remain slow.
“We can’t freeze human life,” said Professor Reddy. “If we can’t physically distance ourselves in crowded cities, we can at least make sure everyone wears a proper mask. And wear it properly. It’s not a big question.”