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On July 1, a few days after a woman in India registered for an account on the careers site Naukri.com and uploaded a resume, a recruiter called her: One of the country’s leading real-estate companies was hiring for a senior position, and more details would follow soon.
The woman had posted her details on the site, whose name means “job” in Hindi, because she feared losing her current role as a mechanical engineer. The coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, and India’s caseload was increasing fast. A brutal weeks-long lockdown had hammered businesses, throwing huge numbers of people out of work, with data later showing that in the three months immediately preceding the recruiter’s phone call, India’s economy had contracted by 23.9 percent. The national capital, New Delhi, where she lived, had been particularly badly affected.
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In the final, darkest days of the deadliest year in U.S. history, the world received ominous news of a mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Scientists in the U.K. had identified a form of the virus that was spreading rapidly throughout the nation. Then, on January 4, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a lockdown that began almost immediately and will last until at least the middle of February. “It’s been both frustrating and alarming to see the speed with which the new variant is spreading,” he said in an address, noting that “our scientists have confirmed this new variant is between 50 and 70 percent more transmissible” than previous strains.