UP stares at a crisis due to vaccine hesitancy
MISINFORMATION AND LACK OF HOSPITAL INFRASTRUCTURE MAY LEAVE COUNTRY’S MOST POPULOUS STATE REELING
When a devastating second wave of Covid-19 infections reached the countryside this spring, the village of Khilwai took immediate action. Two testing centers were set up, and 30 positive cases were isolated. The outbreak was contained with just three deaths.
It was a different story in the two villages on either side of Khilwai. Testing remained limited. The local health Centre in one village had been closed, its staff sent away to a larger hospital. The coronavirus spread, and 30 people in each village died with Covid-19 symptoms.
Prolonging crisis
But even as the three villages in Uttar Pradesh diverged in their handling of the coronavirus, they have been united in another way: a vaccine hesitancy that is prevalent throughout India and threatens to prolong the country’s crisis. The combination of an uneven virus response and a struggling vaccination campaign has left officials warning of a third wave of infections when the second has at best only levelled off. Any sense of rapid relief like the one now prevailing in the US is unlikely anytime soon. “Last year, if you had told somebody that we have over 1,000 deaths a day — and the real number might be five times that — they would have said that is completely unacceptable, but now they are OK if a 100 die everyday” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy, a public health research organisation based in Washington and Delhi.
Daunting task
Vaccinating a population of more than 1 billion was always going to be a daunting task. Rajveer Singh Tyagi, a village leader in Khilwai who had helped rally testing resources to contain the spread, said that persuading people to respond similarly to the vaccination drive had been difficult. “We had vaccination camps, at least four times, but still they are not coming forward,” Tyagi said. In the absence of blanket vaccinations, Uttar Pradesh, like the rest of India, is left to hope that any third wave of infections is not a repeat of the second.
The state is run by Yogi Adityanath, who is up for reelection next year. Critics accuse him of playing down the devastation, even as officials cried out for oxygen and bodies surfaced in the Ganges River. While local elders in Khilwai counted more than 30 deaths in each of the other two villages, teams sent by the district health office to “survey” the claims would register Covid-19 deaths only if there was a positive test certificate.