Image: Amarjeet Kumar Singh/Sipa USA
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, people worldwide were worried. Dispatches out of Italy and New York depicted grim scenarios of flooded hospitals and dying patients. The poor responses of most of the Western world, supposedly more prepared than most for a pandemic, meant predictions of disaster for poorer nations especially India’s 1.2 billion people.
India seemed like the perfect place for COVID-19 to run wild: health infrastructure is underdeveloped, population density is high in urban areas, and the country already suffers from high rates of other diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. Everyone was preparing for a disaster but it never arrived.