Indranil Mukherjee/AFP via Getty Images
India is facing a deepening Covid-19 crisis a year after it went into one of the world’s strictest lockdowns.
But this time around, authorities are reluctant to reimpose a nationwide stay-at-home order. Add to that a flailing vaccination campaign and the spread of new virus variants, and India’s immediate future looks grim.
For nearly a week, the country has recorded more than 200,000 coronavirus cases daily one of the highest rates anywhere in the world, though likely still an undercount. A shortage of beds and oxygen is straining health care systems, particularly in cities such as Mumbai and Delhi.
I called a friend in Mumbai, Shashank Joshi, who is a member of his state’s
COVID-19 task force. “Our I.C.U.s are nearly empty,” he told me. Joshi is a doctor with seemingly infinite reserves of energy: a stethoscope perpetually dangling across his chest, he has spent the past several months carrouselling among slums, hospitals, and government offices, coördinating the state’s response. Early last spring, when the first serious spread of
COVID-19 was reported in India, Joshi jumped into action. Dharavi, in Mumbai, is Asia’s largest slum: a million residents live in shanties, some packed so closely together that they can hear their neighbors’ snores at night. When I visited it a few years ago, open drains were spilling water onto crowded lanes. (The next monsoon season, three young boys fell into the drains and died.) The tin roofs of the houses overlapped one another like fish scales; a roadside tap dripped a brown fluid that passed for potable water. When a toddler
COVID-19 cases in India underreported by over 20 million, study says
Feb 5, 2021 Tests of antibodies, current infections reveal significant spread in India’s southern state
A new study, led by professors at the University of Chicago and Duke University, found that COVID-19 cases in the southern state of Karnataka, India, are nearly 95 times greater than reported.
The study led by Prof. Anup Malani from the University of Chicago’s Law School and Pritzker School of Medicine, and Prof. Manoj Mohanan from Duke University suggests that 44.1% of the population in rural areas and 53.8% in urban areas in the southern state of Karnataka tested positive for antibodies to COVID-19 by the end of August 2020.