Devjyot Ghoshal, Krishna Das. Exclusive: Scientists say India government ignored warnings amid coronavirus surge // Kapil Komireddi: Modi Fiddles While India Burns
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A forum of scientific advisers set up by the government warned Indian officials in early March of a new and more contagious variant of the coronavirus taking hold in the country, five scientists who are part of the forum told Reuters. Despite the warning, four of the scientists said the federal government did not seek to impose major restrictions to stop the spread of the virus. Millions of largely unmasked people attended religious festivals and political rallies that were held by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and opposition politicians.
Tens of thousands of farmers, meanwhile, continued to camp on the edge of New Delhi protesting Modi’s agricultural policy changes. The world’s second-most populous country is now struggling to contain a second wave of infections much more severe than its first last year, which some scientists say is being accelerated by the new variant and another variant first detected in Britain. India reported 386,452 new cases on Friday, a global record.
The spike in infections is India’s biggest crisis since Modi
took office in 2014. It remains to be seen how his handling of it might affect
Modi or his party politically. The next general election is due in 2024. Voting
in the most recent local elections was largely completed before the scale of
the new surge in infections became apparent.
The warning about the new variant in early March was issued by the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genetics Consortium, or INSACOG. It was conveyed to a top official who reports directly to the prime minister, according to one of the scientists, the director of a research centre in northern India who spoke on condition of anonymity. Reuters could not determine whether the INSACOG findings were passed on to Modi himself. Modi’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-warning-excl-idUKKBN2CI2XW
Kapil Komireddi: Modi Fiddles While India Burns
On Jan. 28, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared
victory against COVID-19. Addressing a virtual summit of the World Economic
Forum, he sought applause for saving “humanity from a big disaster by
containing the coronavirus effectively.” Three months on, India is the epicenter
of the pandemic. The country’s health care system is on the precipice of total
collapse. In New Delhi, patients are suffocating to death, relatives are
scrambling for beds, the most advanced hospitals have been reduced to begging
the government for emergency supplies of oxygen, and crematoriums—blazing
nonstop—have run out
of room and wood. Social media is inundated with agonizing pleas for help.
Some have buried their dead in
their gardens. Others have cremated them on makeshift pyres erected on
pavements. In the neglected countryside, a local reporter in southern India
rang to tell me, “People are dropping like flies.” Hardly anybody knows anyone
who hasn’t been ravaged by this contagion. The official death toll, which
surpassed 208,000 on Thursday, is a scandalous undercount. By some estimates,
the true figure could be 20
times that number. A thriving black market for oxygen and essential
medicine has emerged, and a nation acclaimed in 2015 by the International
Monetary Fund as an economic powerhouse poised to overtake China is now
lobbying for emergency foreign aid.
What is unfolding in India is more than a crisis triggered by a pathogen. It is a carnage precipitated by the conduct of its self-enamored leader...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/30/modi-india-covid-19-pandemic-crisis-disaster/
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Public Health-The Nordic Model
