Leaders and scientists need to figure out what should be done to combat variants of the virus.
It will be a while before it’s fully understood why India has been so swiftly and so disastrously engulfed by the coronavirus. But there is one thing for sure: India’s problem is now the world’s problem.
India shut down too abruptly when the virus arrived, and then was too quick to reopen. In March 2020, the country was locked down at four hours’ notice though it did not yet have many cases. Millions of people, many of them migrant workers, were left stranded without food and shelter. Facing economic disaster, the government reopened the country before the pandemic really took hold.
What is happening in India now is quite similar to what the United States experienced in its coronavirus surges. The Indian states where deaths started to mount again in March and April simply closed their eyes and hoped it would go away. After all, India’s first virus wave receded, for reasons that remain unclear.
To make matters worse, states in India have very limited resources of their own—a lockdown costs money, especially if you want to avoid inflicting enormous pain on the poor—and the central government has not offered to pay the bill. (In America last year, the Trump administration was much more generous in comparison.
Not surprisingly, state governments opted to drag their feet until it was impossible to avoid taking action. In the meantime, the disease made its way throughout the country, and new mutations appeared. With the national government unwilling to take ownership of the problem, no one was really tracking how the new variants behaved. Too little, too late is the story of the current outbreak.
The government is now beginning to stir, but it still appears reluctant to embrace a national strategy.
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