The second wave of Covid-19 began on February 10 when India reported just over 11,000 new cases. In the next 50 days, the daily average was...
The second wave of Covid-19 began on February 10 when India reported just over 11,000 new cases. In the next 50 days, the daily average was 22,000 cases. In the following ten days the daily average touched 89,800. We are now adding over 400,000 a day.
India has never been engulfed by a crisis of this order. We are woefully short of hospital beds, oxygen, remdesivir and toclizumab, vaccines, ambulances and sadly even space in our crematoria. The growth and spread are expected to scale to almost a million cases a day. In two months, India has become the world’s basket case.
Yet on January 28, speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Narendra Modi showed a blissful and disturbing ignorance of the looming storm. The committee of scientists monitoring the virus warned the Prime Minister’s Office of the gathering clouds. He was not interested. In his address, he crowed about his achievement of beating back the much-mutated Chinese virus. He was so wrong and India is paying a huge price for it. There is no Modi image of competence left.
The elections to the four states and Puducherry that he was focused on have been his undoing. He began campaigning on...
