JUST A FEW months after India’s public-health systems collapsed under a tsunami of covid-19 infections, the country is starting to feel it has something to celebrate. In good time for the season of Hindu holidays now under way, on October 21st Narendra Modi, the prime minister, declared that India had administered its billionth dose of vaccine. In cities such as Delhi and Mumbai the dedicated covid-19 wards are virtually empty (smaller towns struggled to open any in the first place). A doctor at a major government hospital quipped that it must now be harder to contract the virus in Delhi than anywhere abroad. India’s economy is still wonky, but for most of the summer stockmarket indices have been reaching new heights. Yet this palpable sense of relief is hard to square with the recent memory of mass death, when fields of bodies were buried hastily along the Ganges. How did India manage to beat covid-19?
The plain fact is that, instead, covid-19 beat India. The world watched anxiously in April and May, when the caseloads were climbing almost vertically. The terror was justified. India was gripped by the first outbreak of the Delta variant (briefly called “the Indian variant”, until the WHO insisted on switching to Greek letters). Its ferocity taught lessons that some parts of the world are still learning. Indians died in untold numbers. To judge by the number of excess deaths, something like 2.3m lost their lives to the disease. Those who survived rued the government’s failure to procure vaccines earlier, when India had positioned itself as a pharmaceutical factory for the world. The rate of vaccinations went from a trickle to an erratic drip, as systems of every kind shut down. And then in June, almost exactly as fast as the wave of infections had shot up, it shot down again. Not 10% of the population had been vaccinated (see chart). Within two weeks it was back down to pre-Delta levels. No thanks to any medical intervention.
A survey of blood samples published this week shows that more than 90% of Delhi’s residents have antibodies against covid-19 coursing through their veins. Having weathered the crisis at its worst, Indians are kept safe by natural immunity. The campaign to vaccinate India, slow and sometimes wobbly, has been making steady progress nonetheless. Sometimes it gets a fillip, as when a one-day jabbing extravaganza was organised to celebrate Mr Modi’s 71st birthday. During the darkest days of India’s pandemic, he had hidden himself out of view. Now Mr Modi is eager to put his portrait on every official vaccination certificate. On October 21st a private airline, Spicejet, emblazoned three of its planes with the prime minister’s face to congratulate him on immunising so many of his countrymen. But the “immunisation” that mattered had happened months earlier.
More than half of all Indians have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and almost 25% are considered to be fully vaccinated. That is a fine thing, as even natural immunity wanes. The government is now vaccinating a solid 6m or more every day, while monitoring a caseload of about 150,000 covid-positive patients. At the current rate of progress, India ought to have safeguarded itself against a third wave (really, a second wave of Delta) by the time one might recur on a cyclical basis. There is no more discussion of containing or extirpating the coronavirus. For most people who managed to hold on to their health and livelihood through this grim year, life is getting back to normal (though the nation’s schoolchildren and their parents, still reeling from the world’s longest school closures, would like to have a word). Once again India may be stumbling into the lead—as the rest of the world adjusts itself to endemic covid-19.
More from The Economist explains:
Why official covid-19 deaths do not capture the pandemic’s true toll
What are DNA vaccines?
Why Hong Kong’s “zero-covid” strategy could backfire
How did India beat covid-19? - The Economist
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