India’s government is warned Covid crisis could worsen

COVID-19 infections and deaths are mounting with alarming speed in India, with a top expert warning yesterday that the coming weeks in the country of nearly 1.4 billion people will be “horrible”.

India’s official count of coronavirus cases surpassed 20 million yesterday, nearly doubling in the past three months, while deaths officially passed 220,000. Staggering as those numbers are, the true figures are believed to be far higher.

The country has witnessed scenes of people dying outside overwhelmed hospitals and funeral pyres lighting up the night sky.

Infections have surged in India since February in a disastrous turn blamed on more contagious variants of the virus, as well as government decisions to allow massive crowds to gather for Hindu religious festivals and political rallies before state elections.

Yesterday, the nation’s health ministry reported 357,229 new cases in the past 24 hours and 3,449 deaths from Covid-19.

Dr Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health in the United States, said he is concerned that Indian policymakers he has been in contact with believe things will improve in the next few days. He said: “I’ve been trying to say to them: ‘If everything goes very well, things will be horrible for the next several weeks – and it may be much longer’.”