IS THE WORST OVER?
As India enters Unlock 9—almost a year after first going into lockdown on March 24, 2020—and reopens its cinema halls, malls and swimming pools, it may be a good time to ask where we stand in our fight against Covid-19. The official statistics look encouraging. According to health ministry figures, India recorded less than 9,000 new cases in 24 hours on February 9, a massive drop from the 90,000-odd daily cases it was recording in November. Its total cases as on February 9 stood at 10.8 million and deaths at 155,195, compared to the 27 million cases and 465,000 deaths in the US. And they are a country of 320 million people. On a per capita basis, the number of infections in the US was 12 times that in India.
Of course, many doubt the accuracy of India’s official Covid data, citing underreported cases and deaths. Others attribute the low Covid count to the large number of asymptomatic, and therefore untested, individuals. Even so, there is general consensus that India has done better than the US and some European countries, and that its Covid curve is now declining. “The virus seems to have run its course in India,” says noted virologist Jacob John, “and the epidemic seems to be coming down naturally.” And even if one concedes that the official figures do not capture the real extent of the pandemic, the fact that our health infrastructure remains uninundated suggests we might have escaped the worst of the pandemic. “We are not seeing the kind of hospitalisation demand that was there last year,” Dr N.N. Mathur, director of the Lady Hardinge Medical
