India Covid-19 Crisis Deepened by Missteps and Complacency - The New York Times

The new wave will hurt global efforts and vaccine supplies, experts say.

The sheer number of infections during the first wave led some to believe the worst was over.

A stricken India will set back the global effort.

If inoculations don’t quicken, India would need more than two years to inoculate 70 percent of its population, said Dr.

Laxminarayan said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday played down the possibility of another countrywide lockdown, instead pushing for “micro containment zones.” He said India could contain a second wave with “test, track, treat, and Covid-appropriate behavior.”.

The coronavirus hit the country hard, and India long held the second-largest number of infections after the United States.

But the numbers at the time actually understated the first wave, scientists now say, and deaths in India never matched levels of the United States or Britain.

The virus likely raced through some populations like the urban poor, infecting 300 million to 500 million people, Dr.

“The sad thing is that in a country like India, you can have 400 million infections, but that means 900 million people are not yet infected,” Dr.

Laxminarayan said.

Among people between 45 and 75, fatality rates could be on par with or worse than Italy, Brazil and the United States, Dr.

Laxminarayan said.

For months, the Serum Institute of India, one of the world’s largest vaccine makers, boasted of a major stockpile of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which makes up the bulk of the country’s drive.

The Serum Institute has said that practically all of its daily production of about two million doses will over the next two months go to the government, delaying commitments to other countries.

One million to five million people attend the festival each day in the city of Haridwar, on the banks of the river Ganges in the state of Uttarakhand.

India has put only about 1 percent of its cases through genome sequencing tests, according to Dr.

Reddy, of the Public Health Foundation of India, but researchers require a minimum of 5 percent to determine what is circulating.

Even if the variants have not yet been a major part of the new wave of infections, they have cast a shadow over India’s crucial vaccination drive