Is India a Threat to Us All?


What happens in India does not stay in India.

Thanks, in part, to a rightwing government that downplayed the Covid pandemic, India's limited healthcare system has been overwhelmed. Out of beds, out of equipment, out of essential medical-grade oxygen, the pandemic is beginning to run wild.

India's problems are every nation's problems. Other countries, for their own wellbeing, need to rally to India's side.

That will require countries to look beyond their own health crises to see that the pandemic could still get much worse without intervention. Experts have repeatedly warned that allowing the virus to circulate unchecked increases the risk that dangerous new strains will emerge and prolong the pandemic.

The reality is that the magical thinking displayed by the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s government – which claimed the pandemic was in its “endgame” in March as the country careened towards a second wave of infections – was not much different from the mistakes of other leaders, including the former US president Donald Trump, who thought the virus would simply disappear, or the mistaken boosterism of the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson.

What is different in India – a country with a fragile health system and even weaker surveillance – is the huge possibility for harm locally and globally, perhaps on a scale not yet seen in the pandemic. 

India has already produced a double mutant Covid variant and the Times of India reports that a triple mutant variant has also emerged.

Despite the images we see of massively congested streets in Delhi or Mumbai, only about 30 per cent of the population lives in urban areas. Most are rural dwellers. That dynamic worries Indian doctors. One doctor told the CBC he hopes the virus can be confined to the cities because once it escapes to spread in the country there'll be no hope of containing it.

Comments

  1. LorneApril 25, 2021 at 1:08 PM

    I've said this before, Mound. I have a feeling the world will be playing catchup with this virus for a long time to come.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibApril 25, 2021 at 4:43 PM

      In our relentless quest to become Masters of the Universe we have created the conditions of our undoing, Lorne.

      We have massively overpopulated, extending our habitation into the last remaining wilderness, bringing our species into contact with contagions previously unknown and to which we never developed an immunity.

      We created megacities so congested that easily transmissible diseases spread like wildfire forcing us into "revolving door" lockdowns that we undo prematurely.

      And, because we have adopted a global economy we require the ability to rapidly travel great distances, transporting diseases by passengers who don't even know yet that they're infected.

      These viruses are bad enough but it's the man-made conditions that magnify the problem. When people traveled at the "speed of sail" diseases often ran their course before the ship reached its destination port. Today we carry contagions across vast distances at high subsonic speeds.

      Delete
  2. Caillo Lisa June 26, 2021 at 9:14 AM

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