Don't repeat 2021

Too many of us entered the year thinking that Indians were for some reason less vulnerable to a devastating Covid wave than other, softer countries

At the end of 2020, there were reasons to hope that the second year of the pandemic, 2021, would be better than the first. If, that is, we in India learned the right lessons in India from our errors and misjudgements. The iteration of this column that was published on January 2, 2021, titled “Don’t Repeat 2020”, pointed out that, far from beating the virus, it was likely that another wave would hit soon if a new strain replaced the wild variant in India. It also warned that if a more transmissible variant begins to race through the population, then