Over one million Indians have contracted coronavirus in the past three days. Eighty-two hundred and three have died. Those are just the official cases and almost certainly an undercount; the crematoria are working so consistently in some cities that the furnaces are melting. The official numbers, given population patterns, are just now peaking above where the U.S. is at today. However, it’s likely cases are concentrated in the urban centers, it’s likelier that this represents a fraction of those afflicted, and the health system available to all Indians is in worse shape than ours.
The outbreak comes on the heels of a mass gathering of hundreds of thousands for Maha Kumbh, a Hindu religious festival, and other large events. However India got there and however Prime Narendra Modi might be responsible, in a pandemic and a connected world what happens across continents will likely wind up on our shores, in mutations and variants that just might not be covered by the current suite of vaccines. So it’s an imperative to vaccinate the entire world, and we won’t be safe from crisis until that happens.
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