(2021-04-19) The Pandemic Will Be More Deadly This Year

The Pandemic Will Be More Deadly This Year. Covid-19 is going to kill more people in 2021 than it did last year. If you want to see why, look at what’s happening in India.

As my colleague Mihir Sharma has written, arrogance, hyper-nationalism and incompetence helped foster a fatal sense of complacency amid India’s apparent success against the outbreak earlier this year. Until a few weeks ago, lockdown restrictions had been progressively loosening for months

Worse may be to come. The Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage festival that’s normally the largest mass gathering on earth, is now underway on the banks of the Ganges, attended by an estimated 3.5 million people.

Even held outdoors, such events carry a profound risk of spreading the most infectious variants to every corner of the country. Close to 10% of people returning to Gujarat’s largest city, Ahmedabad, from the festival tested positive for Covid over the weekend

Hitherto, the coronavirus has mostly hit the relatively affluent, urbanized parts of the country that are best able to cope with it

If the Kumbh Mela seeds it in rural districts, where the majority of India’s population lives, the death toll could be higher still.

Vaccine supplies for the richest (and, thanks to global initiatives, poorest) countries are relatively ample. Yet those for middle-income nations, where the majority of the planet’s population lives, are grossly inadequate, blocked by restrictive patent rules.