Not over yet

Covid-19 still remains a big risk

In the two years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on national television to declare that India would be going into complete lockdown —implying, in a reflection of the optimistic conventional wisdom then, that breaking the chain of infection once through a lockdown would be all that was needed to deal with Covid-19 —the pandemic has not exactly ended. The Omicron version of the virus continues to circulate, with case numbers rising in many parts of the world. A new, even more transmissible sub-variant of Omicron may be responsible for this. Yet hospitalisations and deaths do not appear to be concerning policymakers in most countries and the Indian authorities have declared that the end of most Covid-related restrictions other than public masking is now in sight. This is in spite of the fact that the entire eligible population has not yet been covered by a full course of vaccines. About 96 per cent of the eligible population has received at least one dose, but a considerable proportion did not come back for a second. Most other countries seeking to move beyond Omicron, such as European nations and the United States, have also prescribed boosters for the entire population but India’s booster shot remains limited to the vulnerable older sections of the population. Learning to live with an endemic Covid situation is a worthy goal, but the fact remains that this depends upon a successful completion of the vaccination roll-out and well-planned, medically sanctioned booster programmes as well.

The initial lockdown was one of the most draconian worldwide, and led to considerable suffering as people were cut off from livelihoods and their homes. The image of migrant workers from cities struggling to walk home in the middle of the lockdown shocked the conscience of the nation. The government has since defended the stringency of the lockdown, arguing that it meant the first wave of the pandemic was not accompanied by as many fatalities as it would have been otherwise. This counterfactual must be taken seriously, but is impossible to prove. What has been revealed for sure are the limits of the Indian state. It has been able to organise a deep and efficient vaccination programme, but in its initial response to the emergency it discovered that it could not identify and target relief for distressed migrants. This is a major lacuna in the social safety net and must be addressed.

The other broad weakness of the Indian state is overconfidence, which helped lead to the devastating second wave of April and May 2021. The rapid opening up, tolerance of crowded religious and political gatherings, a lack of monitoring of Covid-related norms, and a failure to pay attention to the emergence of possible variants allowed the Delta variant to rampage through the country. The official death toll of the second wave is no doubt an understatement, but it is not clear how much. The lesson here is surely that overconfidence in the face of a mutating virus is fatal. Thus, while the situation at the moment may be somewhat conducive to relaxing nearly all Covid protocols, the government must remain alert. Until the entire population is inoculated and boosted with an appropriate and effective vaccine, the re-emergence of deaths and hospitalisations must always be a worry.