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World awakens to India's Covid disaster
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- What happened: India’s surging coronavirus cases should have been a loud wake-up call. The enormous spike in cases this April came as a surprise, because just months before, an earlier rise in daily cases had dropped mysteriously, and India, home to some of the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturers, seemed well primed for mass immunization.
- It's all gone: But that changed in mid-March, when cases ticked up but vaccinations did not. By April, daily cases had topped 1,00,000, higher than they had ever reached in 2020. Soon, they were more than triple that, setting a record for any nation on Earth and accounting for more than 39 percent of all new cases globally. India’s death toll has crossed 2,00,000, even with serious allegations of undercounting.
- Taken aback: The rapid rise of infections seems to have come from the perfect storm of fast-spreading variants, slow vaccination and relaxed restrictions that public health experts had warned about. And yet for what seemed like an agonizingly long time, it appeared that much of the world was sleeping on it.
- Gradual awakening: As countries like the United States began to see the positive results of mass vaccination programs, Indians took to social media to detail shortages of supplies needed to make vaccines and lifesaving supplies like oxygen. Alarming stories of a new, possibly more infectious virus strain called B.1.617 flooded global headlines.
- In April third week, the world took serious action, with countries from Britain to the United Arab Emirates promising oxygen generators or ventilators.
- Even China, in the midst of a border dispute with India, offered to send vaccine doses to its neighbour.
- Most closely watched was the United States. President Biden told PM Modi that the US would provide “oxygen-related supplies, vaccine materials and therapeutics” and said that the U.S. supply of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine doses would be shared with other nations.
- Is this too little, too late?
- Slow response of US: The situation has renewed questions about U.S. vaccine policy, which has focused on domestic supply and largely neglected broader problems of global vaccine supply, apart from pledging up to $4 million for Covax, the WHO-backed vaccine distribution initiative. Critics, such as British lawmaker Claudia Webbe, have pointed out that the United States and other wealthy countries have not backed calls to waive intellectual property rights for coronavirus vaccines.
- Then there is the complicated issue of U.S. export controls. Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive of Indian vaccine manufacturer Serum Institute, has said that his own supply problems are due to the U.S. use of the Defense Production Act, which limits the exports of critical materials needed to make vaccine doses.
- U.S. officials have pushed back against some of the framing, denying that invoking the Defense Production Act had restricted the export of U.S. materials. But they also refused to answer questions about intellectual property waivers and admitted that exports of an initial 10 million AstraZeneca doses could take “weeks” to reach countries in need.
- Victory declared too early: To many, it looks like Modi declared victory before the battle was over. In a column for the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman wrote that India and Modi had fallen prey to “Covid hubris.” While that malady is not unique, Modi made some “distinctive and disastrous errors,” including a failure “to use the decline in infection after the first wave to prepare properly for a second wave.” Part of it was pride. Writer Vidya Krishnan argues the pandemic has shown the failures of India’s health-care system, increasingly stratified since the economic liberalization of the 1990s.
- Diaspora: For a disaster the size of India’s surge, there is more than enough blame to go around. Alarm bells should have been ringing at least a month ago. Instead, they were ignored for far too long on both a national and international level. That alarms are now blaring is in large part the result of India’s important place on the world stage, including its enormous population and well-connected diaspora — as well as the sheer scale of its current outbreak. But other smaller nations, poorer and less connected, are facing their own worrying waves, too.
- Surges at other places: The world is now seeing a surge in other parts of the rest of the world — Nepal, Colombia, Malaysia could be next. Brazil is still surging. Experts see a worrying uptick in Namibia and Botswana. The world slept through the alarm in India and is now frantically dealing with the nightmare. The task now is to not miss the next wake-up call, if it hasn't done so already.
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