Covid-19 is going to kill more people in 2021 than it did last year. To see why, look at what’s happening in India, writes @davidfickling trib.al/PJggyHX
Cases have been surging in India.
On Sunday alone, 261,500 new infections were recorded. That’s as bad as the U.S. during all but the worst five days of the pandemic in December and early January trib.al/PJggyHX
The B.1.617 variant, which isn’t well understood yet, has features associated with higher infection rates and lower antibody resistance.
It's turning up in more than half of viral samples taken in India trib.al/PJggyHX
If things don’t change soon, the country will be facing 3,000 deaths a day — twice its current level, and 10 times what was being seen through most of this year — @BhramarBioStat, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan, wrote last week trib.al/PJggyHX
With elections underway in the states of Assam and West Bengal, the Twitter feed of President Narendra Modi has been interspersing updates about the virus with Trump-style footage of him, unmasked, addressing mass rallies
The Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage festival that’s normally the largest mass gathering on earth, is now underway on the banks of the Ganges, attended by an estimated 3.5 million people.
That’s well down on the numbers in a normal year trib.al/PJggyHX
Even held outdoors, such events carry a profound risk of spreading the most infectious variants.
Close to 10% of people returning to Gujarat’s largest city, Ahmedabad, from the festival tested positive for Covid over the weekend trib.al/PJggyHX
There’s a lesson in this for the world.
The 1.2 million people who’ve died from Covid so far this year already represent about two-thirds of the 1.8 million fatalities in 2020. Yet people are behaving as if it’s already over trib.al/PJggyHX
The more people infected in emerging countries while the rest of the world looks away, the more opportunities Covid-19 will have to develop into fresh strains and prolong this death and misery.
We must do better trib.al/PJggyHX
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.