India’s is struggling with a catastrophic second wave
L’Inde noyée par une seconde vague de coronavirus.
Ces dernières semaines, l'Inde fait face à une crise sanitaire sans précédent. Une accélération soudaine du nombre de cas de coronavirus a provoqué une saturation du système hospitalier, incapable de fournir de l’oxygène et des lits à tous les malades. Comment et pourquoi le pays a-t-il perdu le contrôle ? Bilan avec The Economist.
Amere three months ago India was starting to feel good about itself. The wave of covid-19 that crested in the autumn seemed to be ebbing away. Addressing university students in late January, Narendra Modi, the prime minister, drew parallels between cricketing glory and his government’s war on covid, noting that both situations presented challenges that required a positive mindset. “With made-inIndia solutions, we controlled the spread of the virus and improved our health infrastructure,” he boasted. In February Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) passed a resolution hailing him as a visionary who had “defeated” covid-19.
2. A month is a long time, in pandemics as in politics. Until March, India was recording barely 13,000 new covid-19 cases a day, fewer than Germany or France and a drop in the ocean for a nation of 1.4bn. The caseload then began to tick gently upwards, until suddenly, late in March, it was rocketing. On April 21st India clocked 315,000 new positive covid-19 tests, above even the biggest daily rise recorded in America, the only other country to record such highs. In contrast to America, however, the pandemic’s trajectory in India is near-vertical.
3. More disturbing still, India’s soaring official covid-19 count represents the tip of an iceberg. Because of low testing rates outside big cities, say epidemiologists, the actual caseload could be anything from ten to 30 times higher. A national serological survey conducted in December found 21% of Indians were carrying covid-19 antibodies, compared with an official tally which suggested that only about 1% of India’s people had been infected by that time.
A DISORGANISED GOVERNMENT
4. The surging caseload has scattered many dominoes, including trust in Mr Modi’s government. However much attention the health infrastructure received during 16 months of pandemic, it was not enough to make up for decades of underinvestment. In big cities in recent weeks, let alone provincial towns, hospitals have fallen fatally short of staff, beds, blood, drugs, oxygen and even oxygen canisters.
5. The vaunted “Made in India” vaccination campaign has flopped disastrously. It turns out that the government counted wrongly, placed orders late, underfunded local suppliers and needlessly rejected foreign vaccines, meaning that by mid-April just 1.3% of Indians had received a full double dose, and instead of supplying the world with vaccines, India has banned exports.
6. Worse still was the government’s seeming indifference to the mounting tragedy. Even as the scale of India’s second wave grew obvious, Mr Modi and his top ministers not only failed to block, but actually encouraged vast gatherings of unmasked people, both at their own giant election rallies and at the Kumbh Mela, a month-long Hindu festival that brings millions of pilgrims to a single small town on the Ganges.
7. The focus of most Indians just now, however, is less on the failings of Mr Modi’s government than on their own anguish. “Last year, possibly you knew someone who knew someone who got covid,” says an IT executive in Mumbai. “This time it is everyone within spitting distance that either has it, or just got over it, or has a close relative who has died from it.”
OVERWHELMED HOSPITALS
8. If the presence of the illness is pervasive, so, largely thanks to social media, is the terrifying reality of mass death. Disturbing scenes have grown familiar: ambulances in mile-long queues to deliver covid patients, engines running to keep oxygen pumps working; body bags heaped in mortuaries; dozens of funeral pyres blazing at once; a middle-aged man lying in front of a health officer’s car, pleading for a spot for his dying father in a hospital; a 65-year-old journalist tweeting his own dying hours as he waits in vain for oxygen.
9. Faced with a shortage of vaccines, Mr Modi's government has now come up with lots of money for Indian producers and liberalised the market, allowing both states and private entities to buy and distribute stocks. Swallowing national pride, it has also agreed to fast-track approvals for half a dozen foreign vaccines. Government directives have tried to steer as much oxygen as possible to medical use, diverting some from equipment used by the fighter jets of the air force.
10. There is no telling how much worse India’s current covid-19 wave will get, or how long it will last. Medical historians note that in the last great global pandemic of this scale, the Spanish flu a century ago, India suffered a mild first and then a mass-murderous second wave. About a third of the estimated 50m people who died worldwide in that epidemic were Indian. Alas, notes Chinmay Tumbe, the author of a book on the subject, India produced timelier statistics then than it does now.
1. mere seulement / to crest atteindre son paroxysme / to ebb away s'atténuer / late ici, fin / to require demander, nécessiter / mindset état d'esprit, mentalité / spread propagation / to improve améliorer / health santé; ici, sanitaire / to boast se vanter / to hail acclamer, saluer, reconnaître / to defeat vaincre.
2. to record enregistrer, comptabiliser / barely à peine / drop goutte d’eau / bn = billion milliard / caseload nombre de cas, nombre de personnes atteintes / to tick upwards augmenter / gently doucement / to rocket grimper en flèche / to clock enregistrer / rise hausse.
3. disturbing inquiétant / still encore / soaring en très forte hausse / tip ici, partie émergée / rate taux / actual réel / survey étude / to conduct mener / to find, found, found ici, montrer, révéler / tally décompte.
4. surging en forte augmentation / to scatter éparpiller, disperser; ici, to scatter dominoes faire chuter considérablement qqch. / trust confiance / to make, made, made up for compenser / decade décennie / let alone sans parler de / to fall, fell, fallen short manquer / staff personnel / blood sang / drug médicament / oxygen canister bonbonne d'oxygène. 5. vaunted tant vanté / to flop être un fiasco / to turn out s’avérer, se trouver / to place an order passer commande / to underfund doter de moyens insuffisants / supplier fournisseur / needlessly inutilement / foreign étranger / to ban interdire.
6. mounting grandissant / scale ici, ampleur / to grow, grew, grown ici, devenir de plus en plus / obvious évident / to fail to ne pas... / actually en fait / gathering rassemblement / own propre / rally rassemblement / pilgrim pèlerin.
7. focus attention / anguish anxiété, détresse / IT = information technology informatique / executive cadre, dirigeant / within à une distance/moins de / spitting distance deux pas, moins d'un mètre (to spit, spat, spat cracher) / to get, got, got over se remettre (de) /
relative parent (membre de la famille), proche.
8. illness virus / pervasive (très) répandu / social media réseaux sociaux / mile = 1,609 km (ici, ... des kilomètres de queue...) / to deliver ici, déposer, amener (à l'hôpital) / engine moteur / to run, ran, run ici, tourner / to heap entasser / pyre bûcher (funéraire) / to blaze brûler / at once en même temps, à la fois, simultanément / to plead implorer, supplier / spot place.
9. shortage pénurie / to come, came, come up with trouver; ici, débloquer /
to allow permettre / to swallow one's pride ravaler sa fierté / to fast-track accélérer / to steer ici, détourner / fighter jet avion de chasse / air force armée de l'air. 10. current actuel / to last durer / global mondial / flu grippe / mild modéré / worldwide dans le monde entier / alas hélas / timely au moment opportun.