THE SECOND WAVE: CRISIS & CONTAINMENT
On April 13, when former district judge Ramesh Chandra, a resident of Lucknow’s Gomti Nagar, and his wife Madhu had a bout of fever and a sore throat, they got themselves tested for Covid-19. The report found both of them positive. As Madhu’s condition deteriorated over the next two days, the former judge made frantic calls to city hospitals for ambulances and, when none came, called up and pleaded with the district magistrate and even officials in the chief minister’s office—to no avail. His wife died on the morning of April 15. But the ordeal was not over yet. Chandra spent a harrowing time trying to get a hearse to take her body to the crematorium. A weeping Chandra says he spent four hours calling friends in high places before one was sent and he could perform her last rites.
Chandra is not the only one facing this nightmarish collapse of medical infrastructure. And it’s not just in Lucknow but across major metros, cities and even smaller towns, in the wake of a monster second wave of Covid-19 infections that has swept the country. So rapid has been the spread that an average of 260,000 people were infected in the week ending April 18—2.5 times the number at the peak of the first Covid wave in September 2020. Worse, it shows no sign of waning. The rate at which active cases are doubling is an alarming 11 days as compared to the 49 or so days at the peak of the first wave. While the World Health Organization recommends bringing the positivity rate down to 5 per cent or lower in order to prevent a surge of the pandemic, our national average has been a high 13.5 per cent, and was an astounding 33 per cent in Delhi on April 20. Eighty per cent of our active cases are confined to 10 states (see accompanying report, Dread and Despair)—Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan—where the sudden surge in demand for treatment has overwhelmed the medical system.
The country is, no doubt, paying a severe price for the complacency shown both by the central and state governments. Declaring premature victory over Covid early this year, they had begun scaling down Covid-19 containment and prevention measures. It lulled the public into discarding Covid-appropriate behaviour, shedding their masks and participating in mass events such as the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar and election rallies in five states going to assembly polls. “In a country of a billion people, a pandemic cannot go away so quickly,” says Dr Virendar Singh Chauhan, director of ICGEB (International Centre for Genetic
