But voices like hers were drowned out by messages from the federal government, which suggested India had somehow foiled the virus. The hype was so strong that even some medical professionals subscribed to it. A professor at Harvard Medical School told the Mint financial daily that “the pandemic behaved in a very unique way in India.”
“The real evil of underestimating is that people will take the pandemic lightly,” says Arun. “If so-called few people die from covid, the public will think it won’t kill and will not change behavior. In fact, by mid-December, India had taken another grim milestone: it recorded its 10 millionth infection. It was only the second country to do so, after the United States.
The government had not put the first lockdown wisely, but December was an opportunity to turn things around, says Gagandeep Kang, professor of microbiology at Christian Medical College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu. She says a number of tactics – speeding up sequencing, studying public behavior, collecting more data, denying authorization of super-spray events, and starting vaccine deployment earlier than expected – would have saved many lives. many lives during the now inevitable second wave.
Instead, she says, the government continued its “top-down approach,” in which bureaucrats rather than scientists and medical professionals made decisions.
“We live in a very unequal society,” she says. “So we need to engage people and build partnerships at a granular level if we are to deliver information and resources effectively. “
In December, the Goa government let its guard down completely. The state is heavily dependent on tourism, which accounts for nearly 17% of its income. The bulk of tourists turn up in December to celebrate Christmas and New Years on sandy beaches with raves and fireworks.
Vivek Menezes, a journalist from Goa, says the state’s reputation as “the place to be” has not faded during the pandemic. “This is the place for the rich of India and for Bollywood, and therefore this is the place for India,” says Menezes. The pandemic had prevented foreign tourists from visiting, but domestic vacationers were pouring in. Some states, such as Maharashtra, had imposed restrictions on their borders; others, like Kerala, had a strict contact tracing policy. In Goa, visitors did not even have to present a negative covid test. And the state’s hiding policy extended only to health workers, visitors to health facilities and people with symptoms. “Goa was left to the dogs,” explains Menezes.
World’s Largest Super Spreader
India began 2021 after recording nearly 150,000 deaths. It wasn’t until then, in January, that the government placed its first vaccine order, and it was for an incredibly low amount – just 11 million doses of Covishield, India’s version of the AstraZeneca vaccine. . It has also ordered 5.5 million doses of Covaxin, a locally developed vaccine that has yet to release efficacy data. These orders were well below what the country really needed. Subhash Salunke, senior advisor to the independent Public Health Foundation of India, estimates that 1.4 billion doses would have been needed to fully immunize all eligible adults.
On January 28, in an address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Modi declared that India had “saved mankind from a great catastrophe by effectively containing the crown”. His government then gave the green light to the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival that draws overwhelming crowds of millions to the holy city of Haridwar in the northern state of Uttarakhand, famous for its temples and its places of pilgrimage. When the former chief minister of state suggested the festival should be “symbolic” this year given the circumstances, he was sacked.
A senior politician of the Prime Minister’s Bharatiya Janata party Told Indian magazine The Caravan that the federal government had its eye on the upcoming state elections and did not want to lose the support of religious leaders. As it turned out, the Kumbh was not just any large-scale event – with 9.1 million people in attendance, it was the the biggest super-broadcaster event. “Anyone with a basic public health manual would have told you now is not the time,” Kang says.
The Indian government did not place its first vaccine order until January 2021, after recording nearly 150,000 deaths. Even then, it was for a shockingly low amount – 11 million doses of Covishield and 5.5 million doses of Covaxin for a country of 1.3 billion.
In February, Salunke, the public health expert, was working in an agrarian district in the western state of Maharashtra when he noticed the virus was spreading “much faster” than before. It affected entire families.
“I felt like we were dealing with an agent who had changed or seemed to have changed,” he says. “I started to investigate.” Salunke, it now turns out, had found a mutation of a variant that had been detected in India the previous October. He suspected that the variant, now known as the Delta, was about to hit the ground running. It made. It is now present in more than 90 countries.
“I went to see all those in charge and those that matter, whether they are officials at the district level or bureaucrats at the central level, you name it. Everyone I knew with whom I immediately shared this information, ”he says.
Salunke’s discovery does not appear to have affected the official response. Even as the second wave gained momentum and after the WHO designated the new mutation a “variant of interest” on April 4, Modi kept his busy schedule ahead of the West Bengal state election, personally appearing at many public gatherings.
At one point he jubilee about the size of the crowd he had drawn: “In all directions I see huge crowds… I have never seen such a crowd at a rally.
“The rallies were a direct message from leaders that the virus was gone,” said Laxminarayan of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy.
The second wave filled hospitals, which quickly ran out of beds, oxygen and medicine, forcing panting patients to wait – and then die – in homes, in hospitals. parking spaces, and on sidewalks. Crematoriums had to build makeshift pyres to meet demand, and there were reports that the ash-pouring drifted so far that it stained clothes a mile away. Many poor people could not even afford the funeral rites and dived the bodies of their loved ones directly into the Ganges, leading to hundreds of corpses washing up on the shores of several states. Along with these doomsday scenes, it was learned that deadly fungal infections were crushing covid patients, possibly due to weaker infection control and over-reliance on steroids in treating the virus.
The chaos continues; Delta spreads
And from the start, there has been Modi. The Prime Minister had been the face of India’s fight against the pandemic – literally: his photo of the head featured prominently on the certificate given to people who get vaccinated. But after the second wave, his untimely triumphalism was mocked and his lack of preparation widely derided. Since then, he has largely disappeared from the public eye, leaving it to his colleagues to lay the blame elsewhere, notably – and wrongly – on the political opposition of the government. As a result, Indians faced the greatest national crisis of their lives on their own.
This abandonment created a sense of camaraderie among certain groups of Indians, with many use social media and WhatsApp to help each other by sharing information about hospital beds and oxygen cylinders. They also organized themselves in the field, distributing meals to people in need.
“The [BJP] the rallies were a direct message from the leaders that the virus was gone. “
Ramanan Laxminarayan, Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy
But the leadership vacuum has also created a huge market for profiteers and con artists at the highest level. In May, opposition politicians accused ruling BJP party leader Tejaswi Surya of participating in a vaccine commission scam. And Goa’s Health Minister Vishwajit Rane was forced to deny claims he was involved in a scam involving the purchase of ventilators. Even Prime Minister PM Cares’ signature covid relief fund has come under fire after spending 2,250 crore rupees (over $ 300 million) on 60,000 ventilators that doctors later complained to be faulty and “too risky to use.” The fund, which has attracted at least $ 423 million in donations, has also raised concerns about corruption and lack of transparency.
A successful vaccination program might have helped erase the memory of the series of missteps, but under Modi it was only one technocratic mistake after another. At the end of May, with far fewer vaccines on hand than needed, the government announced its intention to start mixing doses of different types of vaccines. And at the height of Wave 2, he introduced Co-WIN, an online reservation system required for anyone under the age of 45 trying to get a vaccine. The system, who had been under surveillance for months, has been catastrophic: not only has it automatically excluded those who don’t use computers and smartphones, it has also been hit by bugs and overwhelmed by people desperate for protection.
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