India’s Covid-19 crisis must serve as warning to rest of world

The only way to prevent what has happened in the country from occurring elsewhere is to complete vaccination programmes – and to do it now, writes Adam Withnall

A health worker takes a swab sample to test for Covid-19 at a roadside testing centre in Delhi (EPA)

Some 15 months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has become familiar with the steady ebb and flow of case numbers in various parts of the globe – a new outbreak here, a change in lockdown restrictions there, while we wait for vaccines to do their work.

In this backdrop, it is hard to get across the speed, the chaos and all-consuming nature of the second wave that has hit India in the past few weeks.

The numbers you see reported each day are enormous yet, given the known problems with under-reporting, still only hint at the true scale of this crisis, which is unlike anything the world has seen to this point. 

It is not just that hospitals have been overwhelmed, as happened in northern Italy and New York at the beginning of the pandemic. Rather, the desperate scramble for basic supplies, oxygen tanks and hospital beds across a city of more than 20 million people makes it feel like the healthcare system in its entirety has collapsed.

Twitter in India, usually a fairly hostile place, is now almost entirely devoted to SOS calls by people seeking help for friends, colleagues and loved ones. Locked at home and watching this disaster unfold, those who are not sick themselves now respond to these calls in their thousands, trying to save at least one life by securing medicine or space on a ward for a stranger.

On the surface of it, this collective strain to survive is heart-warming. But it is also terrifying to think that such a haphazard and informal system is the difference between life and death for so many – and completely out of reach for a whole section of society not clued in to the online community.  

Several of the The Independent’s reporters in India, including myself, have caught the virus and had symptoms – but others are looking after sick family members and no one has been spared entirely.

The way this variant, or combination of variants, has ripped its way through the country should be a warning to all others against complacency in this pandemic, so many months on. Forget what you thought you knew: it is affecting young and old alike, infecting people with antibodies and first vaccine doses after minimal contact while wearing masks, killing on a scale not seen in India in the first wave or, quite possibly, anywhere else in the world.

India’s present crisis, coming after serosurveys showed high levels of antibodies among the population, should finally kill the idea that natural herd immunity was ever an option in this pandemic. The only way to prevent another India happening elsewhere is to complete vaccination programmes – and to do it now.

Yours,

Adam Withnall

Asia editor