Here in part is how The New York Times reported yesterday on this unfolding tragedy:
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A deadly second wave of coronavirus infections is devastating India, leaving millions of people infected and putting stress on the country’s already overtaxed health care system.
Officially, by the end of April, more than 17.9 million infections had been confirmed and more than 200,000 people were dead, but experts said the actual figures were likely much higher. In the same period, India was responsible for more than half of the world’s daily Covid-19 cases, setting a record-breaking pace of more than 300,000 a day. …
Overwhelmed by new cases, Indian hospitals cannot cope with the demand, and patients in many cities have been abandoned to die.
Clinics across the country have reported an acute shortage of hospital beds, medicines, protective equipment and oxygen.
The Indian government says that it has enough liquid oxygen to meet medical needs and that it is rapidly expanding its supply. But production facilities are concentrated in eastern India, far from the worst outbreaks in Delhi and in the western state of Maharashtra, and it can take several days for supplies to reach there by road.
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You’d be forgiven the impression that images of Covid’s ravages coming out of India hearken back to the days of the Bubonic plague – when countries could scarcely bury their dead, let alone vaccinate them. But India is only experiencing on a grander scale today what America was experiencing around this time last year.
More to the point, though, the Indian people are suffering the consequences of the bond that animated the celebrated bromance between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former President Donald Trump: blissful, willful ignorance as a pandemic killed off their people, respectively.
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