Covid-19: India at War

Covid-19 has come home to India’s urban centres, to middle class homes, to the elite, to the working class, in ways that diminish what happened last year when the pandemic first struck. There’s a waiting list everywhere and for everything — for tests, admission to hospitals, even at crematoriums and graveyards (with on-ground reports suggesting a disjunction between official fatality figures and these). And there is a shortage of everything — oxygen, ICU beds, and remdesivir. And everywhere and for everything, getting care has become dependent on who you know, as public health systems collapse, automatically excluding the majority.

It did not have to be this way. The government may have made an error of judgment in not anticipating the intensity of the second wave, though there were adequate warnings. But, the current situation does highlight a clear policy failure on varied counts — from not using the past year to boost India’s health infrastructure enough to deal with current numbers to slipping into business-as-usual mode when it came to events (including large elections), from a painfully slow rollout of the vaccination (only absolute numbers as a proportion of the population, not relative to the rest of the world, matter here) to the delay in imposing curbs. What’s important now is to fix the crisis, and be prepared in case there is another wave after this one (remember the United State’s third wave was its worst, although it came before the vaccine drive began). This requires the State to pump all its resources into beat the second wave. It is war, and nothing short of a war effort is needed.