How did COVID get so bad in India?
Every four minutes, a person dies of coronavirus in Delhi.
There are shortages of hospital beds and medical oxygen.
Crematoriums are at full capacity.
New infections have reached 400,000 a day.
In April 2021, India became the epicenter of the pandemic.
I'm speechless about the situation, what's going on and how people are suffering.
Their family members are dying in front of them in
their hands just due to lack of infrastructure and lack of basic
necessities, which is not available in hospitals.
The World Health Organization blamed a "perfect storm of factors" for India's COVID crisis.
And the humanitarian crisis we see today is
very different from the narrative pushed out by India's government.
India eased lockdown restrictions in phases, ending in November 2020.
Many people thought that India had escaped the worst of the virus.
Then in the spring of 2021, a Hindu festival with millions of pilgrims was allowed to go forward.
Spectators even returned to watch India versus England cricket matches.
This included a 60,000-strong crowd at the Narendra Modi stadium.
And then there was this:
India's state elections.
Big groups were allowed to gather to bolster support for Prime
Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party.
Like in Kolkata, where a maskless Modi addressed an estimated 800,000 people.
Modi's government opposed a second lockdown while the second wave was already
underway because of the risk to economic recovery.
It's a very different response compared with when the outbreak first struck.
In March 2020, Modi's government imposed a severe lockdown on the country.
Indians were given four hours' notice to prepare.
Unemployment soared and millions were left jobless.
The pandemic highlighted India's lack of social safety net.
Yet India seemed to have escaped the worst of the pandemic in 2020.
Some put it down to its youthful population or suggested large areas had reached herd immunity.
But these theories fueled a narrative of Indian exceptionalism.
In January 2021, Modi told world leaders India was victorious against COVID and had "saved humanity
from a big disaster by containing corona effectively."
His COVID task force didn't meet for three months from January to April.
In that time, India's caseload increased seventeen-fold.
And Modi's health minister assured the public the country had reached a pandemic end goal.
Meanwhile, India faced a vaccine shortage.
And there was a lack of urgency in getting people vaccinated.
Only 2% of India's 1.4 billion people have been fully inoculated.
The government only ordered enough vaccines for 4% of the population,
even though India is a powerhouse in producing vaccines.
Instead, New Delhi exported 60 million shots worldwide.
Critics say "vaccine diplomacy" is being used by countries like India to
exert influence on the world stage.
This was happening while there were warnings of a new variant of the virus at home.
Scientists are studying whether the B.1.617 variant,
first detected in India in December, is behind the harrowing outbreak.
It contains two mutations to the outer spike portion of the virus that attaches to human cells.
We know this variant is widely present in the country's hardest-hit state Maharashtra,
home to Mumbai.
Now hospitals are on the brink.
This is the Holy Family Hospital in New Delhi.
The aren't enough beds, oxygen or ventilators to keep everyone who arrives alive.
It's where this 26-year-old junior doctor
decides who must live and who must die.
That deep sound is continuously in my head,
even when we are sleeping,
that beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,
that casualty noise, the ICU noise
that continuously goes in our head, in our ears every time, every day.
Rohan has 27-hour shifts and isn't vaccinated himself.
Authorities didn't build up the health care infrastructure when cases were low.
Antiviral drugs were not stockpiled.
Experts have warned for a long time that India has a severe lack of medical oxygen.
And India's health care system was already chronically underfunded.
The country spends about 1% of its gross domestic product on health.
That's the lowest among major economies.
The COVID cases keep coming and the humanitarian crisis continues.