A devastating COVID surge takes a fresh toll on Indian journalism
More than a year into the global pandemic, the coronavirus has exploded across India. The spread has been fueled, in part, by possible new variants and the recent holding of mass public events, including political rallies and religious celebrations; vaccination rates, meanwhile, remain low, even as Indian manufacturers have busily churned out doses for residents of other countries. Hospitals have run low on beds and oxygen, and crematoria are overflowing; steel pipes at one such facility in Surat, in Gujarat state, melted from overuse. India has recorded more than three-hundred-thousand new daily cases for six days in a row—smashing the daily record for a single country several times over—and that figure is likely a substantial undercount. So, too, is the official daily death count, which yesterday came close to three thousand—a function of factors ranging from familial shame to political pressure. “It’s a complete massacre of data,” Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told the