Once a day, every morning at 8am and then only, the Indian government’s health ministry updates its website to put out a handful of basic Covid-19 numbers, including what the current cumulative count of cases is. Many Indians watch it as if it were the scoreboard of a cricket match, and last week, India recorded the third-highest number of cases in the world. Will India climb to the top of the scoreboard? It might well happen, but that scoreboard hides a lot of nuance about India’s good intentions and impossible implementation. Both the United States and Brazil are currently reporting more new cases on most days than India is, but new cases are rising far faster in India. So theoretically, India could overtake the two countries within months. However, if India does overtake the US and Brazil, it won’t be for entirely the same reasons that cases are currently swelling in the two Western countries. Both the US and Brazil are led by men who have in the past made light of the severity of the virus, did not wear masks, have not maintained the recommended social distance while meeting supporters, and rail against restrictions on the economy and on free movement. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro was ordered by a court to start wearing a mask, and was diagnosed with Covid-19 on July 7. US President Donald Trump continues to push back against public health measures that in any way curtail individual “freedoms”, tweeting on July 8 against his own health agency’s safety regulations for schools . Trump dons face mask as US smashes own daily virus record India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on the other hand, might lead the most hardline right-wing Hindu administration to have governed India, but the Indian political right as it operates on the ground does not organise around individual freedoms in the way the right is understood in Western political theory. Modi has been deadly serious about the threat of the pandemic. By the last week of March, if there were Indians who were still unaware of the scale of the spread of the coronavirus in India, Modi’s televised address to the nation on March 24, a Tuesday night, left little doubt. Announcing a nationwide lockdown for the next three weeks, starting in four hours from his address, Modi said: “If [the] situation is not handled in these 21 days, the country and your family could go back 21 years.” The right intentions and one of the strictest lockdowns in the world would seem to have bought India time. But the ability to pull off any far-reaching health sector upgrade or reform in the next three months, let alone the next three weeks, simply did not exist. The first Indian city to experience an Italy-style overwhelming of its hospitals was Mumbai, the financial capital in western India, and a city of 12.5 million people. By late April, Mumbai’s intrepid journalists were describing scenes of chaos outside the city’s leading hospitals – one newspaper reported that a Covid-19-positive elderly woman sat in a wheelchair in a hospital car park for 30 hours as her family raced around the city trying to secure her a bed. India’s rich take private jets to escape coronavirus-hit cities A little over a month later, India’s capital, New Delhi, was experiencing its surge, and the same story was repeating itself, resulting in deaths of Covid-19-positive people as they were shuttled across the city from hospital to hospital desperately seeking a bed. A full five months after the southern Indian state of Kerala reported its first case, a medical student who had flown back home from Wuhan, China, the state of Karnataka, which shares a border with Kerala, is experiencing its own surge, with cases doubling in just over a week, the fastest of any major Indian state. The state’s capital city of Bangalore prides itself on being the crucible of Indian tech innovation. Yet, once again the lack of capacity and coordination is leading to inhuman scenes, such as a breathless patient being pushed out of an ambulance as the hospital he had arrived at had no beds. Nor, once peak incidence subsides, will most Indians be able to work from home or practise social distancing, measures recommended by public health experts to keep numbers low for the next few months or years. Most Indians have received no Trump-style stimulus cheque , and no UK-style furloughs , and with 120 million people – particularly women and marginalised groups – having lost employment as of April, three months of lockdown have led to people eating into their savings, and desperate to look for or return to work. The cases will keep rising, but unlike in the US where the current spike can be clearly linked to lockdown restrictions easing, presenting the possibility of the numbers being controlled again soon, India’s numbers have no real place to go except right through its population. The seriousness with which the government of India and of Indian states have taken the pandemic might have blunted its force from what could have been. But without a reimagination that needed to have happened years before the pandemic, right now there’s nowhere to go on that scoreboard but up. Rukmini S is a Chennai-based independent data journalist. She is the former data editor of The Hindu and Huffington Post India