India: the “meteoric” rise of Covid-19
Seven months since the first case of Covid-19 in the country, India has begun to rack up some unenviable records, said Chandrakant Lahariya in The Indian Express (Noida). It’s now registering more new infections each day than any other nation. Indeed, it’s registering more new cases each day – in excess of 90,000 – than the total number of cases reported in China throughout the entire pandemic. With its tally of Covid cases standing at over 4.8 million, India has overtaken Brazil to become the country with the second highest number of recorded infections in the world. And within weeks it looks set to take the top spot from America, which has reported over 6.5 million cases. The sheer pace at which India’s infections are increasing is as worrying as the numbers involved, said R. Krishnakumar in the Khaleej Times (Dubai). Its first million confirmed cases took 170 days to accumulate; its fourth, just 14.
The meteoric rise in India’s Covid cases has been attributed partly to increased testing, said The National (Abu Dhabi). The country is reportedly second only to the US in this regard, carrying out more than a million tests each day. But experts have also blamed the recent easing of restrictions in India. Metro services resumed in the capital, New Delhi, last week. The main culprit, said Jeffrey Gettleman in The Economic Times (Mumbai), was the lockdown imposed in March, which managed to be both “too tight and too porous”. Imposed with just four hours’ notice, it put tens of millions of Indians out of a job instantly and led an army of migrant workers to scatter from cities back to their rural homes. This both seeded Covid outbreaks across the land and devastated India’s economy, which has shrunk faster than any other major nation. Its economy contracted by 23.9% in the last quarter. A nation that had seemed poised for great things is now facing very hard times. As many as 400 million of its citizens could slip back into poverty, according to some estimates. In the words of the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, “the engine has been smashed”.
The one “silver lining” for India in its fight against Covid is that it has experienced a relatively low mortality rate from the disease, said Akash Bisht on Al Jazeera. The combination of social distancing precautions and a median age below 30 have kept the number of deaths (currently around 80,000) lower than some feared. With the battle to contain Covid well and truly lost, India must now focus on keeping the mortality rate down. That will require urgent action on air pollution, said Prof Michael Brauer in the Hindustan Times. It’s lucky for India that the pandemic so far has occurred during spring and summer when its country’s skies are relatively clear. But the combination of winter’s typically high air pollution levels and Covid infections could prove lethal.