'India's Covid-19 case fatality is not lower than of other countries'

Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy says that the myth that India has low Covid fatality rate has led to people not taking it seriously

The biggest value of the Covid-19 vaccine is reducing severe disease and mortality," says Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy, a health think-tank. "Why waste the vaccine on 20-year-olds?"

As the global Covid-19 ground zero shifts to India, as The Wall Street Journal put it, with nearly 100,000 cases per day, we spoke to Laxminarayan, also a senior research scholar at Princeton University and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, on what the second wave means for India and what India should do to control it.

Laxminarayan, who has been