Opinion | How India’s coronavirus trauma is being made worse by vaccine challenges and feckless decisions
- India is vaccinating at top speed and approving more vaccines but is still struggling with the challenge of its massive population, while also letting huge crowds gather
- With hospitals already overwhelmed, experts expect the latest wave of infections to peak in May, or later
In just a week, India has overtaken Brazil in total cases and is now second only to the United States, which has more than 32 million cases, though with a stable and much lower daily infection rate.
Experts worry that India’s abrupt surge in Covid-19 infections may soon acquire alarming proportions and become unmanageable for the Modi government. The peak may only come next month, or later, and the projections are grim, said Dr Bhramar Mukherjee, professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health, University of Michigan.
Most models predict that daily cases could hit 300,000-500,000 at the peak, which translates, she said, to “20,000-25,000 hospitalisation[s] and 3,000-4,000 deaths every day. This will surely overwhelm the health care infrastructure.”
The complexity of the challenge facing India is reflected in the Covid-19 metrics used globally. On the one hand, India has done well to keep its death rate down to 125 per million of population, compared with the US at more than 1,700, and Britain and Italy at about 1,900 each. In terms of total deaths, India also comes out better at just over 170,000, compared to about 578,000 for the US, 362,000 for Brazil and nearly 211,000 for Mexico.