India’s Covid catastrophe
May 5, 2021 ·
India’s Covid catastrophe
“Crematories are so full of bodies, it’s as if a war just happened. Fires burn around the clock. Many places are holding mass cremations, dozens at a time, and at night, in certain areas of New Delhi, the sky glows.”
Jeffrey Gettleman, the New Delhi bureau chief for The Times, wrote a first-person account of life in the pandemic’s global epicenter. Friends are sick. Neighbors are sick. Colleagues are sick.
“I’m sitting in my apartment waiting to catch the disease,” Jeffrey writes. “We know the terrifying force of this second wave, hitting everyone at the same time.”
India now records more infections per day — as many as 350,000 — than any other country has since the pandemic began. Most experts think that official number is a vast underestimation.
A few days ago, the positivity rate in New Delhi hit a staggering 36 percent. Even wealthy and well-connected people cannot skirt lines or get oxygen, now in short supply. There are just no more strings left to pull.
Science: A new variant, a “double mutant” is wreaking havoc. The science is still early, but it seems the variant is more contagious and more resistant to vaccines.
Grim predictions: Epidemiologists say the numbers will keep climbing, to 500,000 reported cases a day nationwide and as many as one million Indians dead from Covid-19 by August.
