Nowhere is Corona currently spreading as fast as in India, the country is at the top with the daily increase in cases. This means enormous burdens for the health system: It plunges deeper and deeper into a deadly crisis. And the fact that India is so big, has almost 1.4 billion inhabitants, the second highest population in any country in the world, makes the fight against Covid-19 a really extraordinary challenge – for example now with vaccination. There are about 2.7 million vaccinations a day, but still less than ten percent of the population have received their first dose.
Authorities believed the worst was over when the number of new infections began to decline last September. This trend lasted for 30 weeks in a row, but cases started to pick up again from mid-February. Experts say the country missed the opportunity to improve health care infrastructure and boost vaccinations on a massive scale. “We were so close to success,” says Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan in the US who has been tracking the pandemic in India.
Despite warnings that protective precautions must be taken, the authorities were not prepared for the extent of the new wave of Covid, complains K. Srinath Reddy from the Public Health Foundation of India, a non-profit health foundation. Critics have denounced, among other things, that the government has refused to suspend religious Hindu festivals or elections, which experts say may have exacerbated the new wave of infections. “Authorities in all parts of India have invariably postponed public health priorities,” says Reddy.
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