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Migrant workers in New Delhi. Credit: Vipin Kumar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Lockdown in the world’s biggest democracy arrived with barely a warning. Citizens had no more than four hours to stock up, recalibrate travel plans, return to their families and reassess how they would find work gainful enough to pay for the next meal. Even so, in India there was only a murmur of protest at the loss of personal freedoms.
And yet, weeks later, on the highways leading out of Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and other major cities, policemen were using their batons to rap citizens breaking lockdown rules. Millions of migrant workers, unable to afford rent or food without a daily income, had begun the long walk home to villages hundreds of kilometres away, children and belongings in tow. A sea of people was fleeing cities built by their toil, growing more desperate as the lockdown wore on and transport networks remained shut.
More than 90% of all Indian labour is informal, a lot of it casual, and about 140 million Indians are migrant labourers, living some part of the year in cities and industry hubs located long distances from their homes. The world was introduced to this workforce during April and May 2020, mostly through photographs of them trudging along highways in the blazing sun. Ten workers were arrested from inside the cylindrical tank of the milk van that was their getaway vehicle. One little girl walked 100km from where she’d worked picking chillies before dying 20 km from home. Sixteen men were run over by a goods train — they thought the railway tracks were safer than the highways as no passenger trains were operating.
But public memory is short, and most have forgotten the stories.
Helping dim the memory of those visuals is the view, among those looking only at Covid-19 infection data, that the Indian government’s response to the pandemic is a success story, despite a fresh spike in cases through the second half of February.
In September 2020, the nation was recording about 100,000 positive cases every day; now, a little over 16,000 are being recorded, less than a quarter of the daily new cases in the United States, which is itself easing restrictions. In total, India has recorded almost 11million infections, second only to the US, but our mortality rate is 1.42%, compared to the world average of 2.21%. More than 14.3 million doses of the vaccines have been administered, in one of the world’s fastest Covid immunisation programmes.
The jury is still out on what shrank India’s Covid epidemiological challenge in comparison to mid-2020, but experts concur that a combination of circumstances deserves credit. Sero-surveys conducted between December and January found that about a fifth of Indians have been exposed to the virus already — up to every second or third person in the big cities. Urban India’s generally lax public hygiene may be a factor. In rural India, where healthcare has historically suffered from neglect, it is likely that many of those infected were not counted, having experienced only mild symptoms. But the government will no doubt congratulate itself for imposing a 70-day near-stoppage of economic activities and penal action against those violating curbs on personal freedoms.
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SubscribeAlmost a year ago, the much-reviled Oxford epidemiologist, Sunetra Gupta, questioned the wisdom of lockdowns and said they were a strategy devised by the affluent middle class for the benefit of the affluent middle class, and would cause incalculable harm in poorer countries. I fear she has been proved correct, at least in India.
Some months ago I read an on-line article reporting on the “strange” behavior of the coronavirus in Africa. It turned out this “strange” behavior was that covid wasn’t killing many people in Africa. The author mildly suggested that might be because the average age of Africans is much lower than in the developed West and covid is primarily a disease of the elderly. Nonetheless, many African countries imposed severe lockdowns.
What terrible harm governments throughout the world have done by mindlessly applying the blunt tool of lockdowns. All in the name of “science”. Yet science has taught us so much about who is dying from coronavirus, who should be protected, where and when limited lockdowns are justified, and who should be left to go about their daily business with only limited protective measures.
The response to this pandemic really has been a form of mass hysteria.
Bang on. The median age in India is 26.8. In most African countries it is under 20. There is no benefit of hindsight here, all was known a year ago.
I agree with all of that, although I would describe the response to the pandemic as ‘mass tyranny’ not ‘mass hysteria’. It has been truly shocking to witness (and experience) the response of the politicians and their handmaidens across most the media. One gets a sense of what is must have felt like to be an aware and observant person in 1930s Germany.
Has the pandemic provided a reason for these people to simply display their true nature on an ad hoc, per country basis? Or is there a wider and coordinated agenda to destroy all our lives forever?
My feelings are that it’s the latter, i.e. a very good excuse for implementing the sorts of draconian measures that they’d like to have done in the name of fighting “climate change.”
(The climate changes. The climate always changes. Fighting it is like trying to turn back the tides).
Well possibly. “The Great Reset” advocated by the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum? I assumed that was just a swivel-eyed conspiracy theory until I read a bit more about it recently from what seem like reputable sources – there’s enough out there in the public domain anyway to make most reasonable people shiver. Destroy most of what we used to rely on in order to “build back better”. Better for whom, though?
There are still some very big missing pieces in the behaviour of the virus. It’s infection profile is very odd and to my mind as yet far from explained. The age demographics are not the full explanation. India is far too chaotic, with huge numbers of poor people who have no choice but to work, to successfully manage systematically like the west or China – it’s essentially unpolicable from that perspective.
If the virus had followed the same infection profile as in the UK or US, even with one in a thousand needing the hospitals, the sheer numbers of young people (and old) who got it would have been so large as to overwhelm all medical services with people dying in huge numbers in their homes. The 100k+ deaths in the UK would extrapolate to millions dead in India even with the much younger population. It’s been bad enough but that has not happened, and the reason is still unanswered. This is not a done deal yet and mutations may still emerge, but the UK or SA or Brazil variants don’t seem to be having the same effect assuming they are already in India, which they have to be. Also, if huge numbers of young people got asymptomatically infected, I would have thought that would be ideal territory for many more lethal variants to emerge from there, if the theories of how mutations emerge are credible. Indian would by now be a huge factory for mutations creation, yet that has not happened either.
I know an IT guy in their twenties in India who got it, on the back of both parents getting it. Then, sister got it after that. All eventually recovered, with the parents spending a short time in hospital. The guy was off work for two weeks, came back, then off work on odd days when not feeling well for weeks after.
There is a lot unknown still, even if the vaccines stop the virus.
But evolutionary pressures sre such that, over time the most successful variants are those which are more transmittable and less virulent.
Yes I accept that might be the case for locally generated mutations, but doesn’t answer the question why the other world wide variants which get into India are not having the same effect, for example like the UK variety which caused the big second wave here. I would find it very difficult to believe the UK variant has never made it to India – there is still traffic in and out of the country.
In the UK and across much of the world, flu disappeared overnight. Look at any graph of flu infections last year and they drop off a cliff.
Go to worldometers, China 3 deaths per million, India, 113, UK (as a representative of the West) 1810. Shocking or what? Obviously there is the ‘Dark Matter Immunity’, like Dark matter no one can detect it but physics proves it exists, like these numbers do on immunity. 600 more deaths in UK than China per million.
To me this proves this was a illness of the West (and new world). using Ockham’s razor to figure why it worked like this one can look at the the facts and guess what covid has been about.
On average, the population in the West is a lot fatter, with accompanying problems such as diabetes and heart disease, not to mention asthma, another condition more common in Western industrialised countries. Obesity, diabetes and the rest are known danger factors with this virus. That could help to explain the anomalies.
If China really had 3 deaths per million why on earth would they bother with any measures at all? Or are you saying their measures affected the numbers? But then in Europe and varied USA states measures have had no relateable impact on death numbers. Sometimes I hate the confusion over what is happening as much as the lockdown…
These figures don’t tell me there’s a “Dark Matter Immunity” (unless you mean that, like dark matter, it doesn’t exist). I see no reason to trust the disclosed Chinese numbers, and the low figure of 3 deaths per million states clearly that there’s more travel between Wuhan and the rest of the world (mostly the affluent West, of course) than between regions of China, and that travel bans work by preventing the disease arriving in the first place, and that’s a lot better than social distancing, masks, and hand washing.
And why choose the UK as representative of the West? The UK is still an outlier.
All copying the Chinese Communist Party.
And that’s assuming the stories and videos coming out of China last year were real and not staged, like the ones of people dropping dead in the street.
I was shocked by the brutal way in which the lockdown was imposed in India and the horrific suffering it has added to already difficult lives. India is a country where many people die each year simply because of diarrhoea,TB claims another 220,000 lives annually. India also toped the global list for child mortality with 318 deaths per 1000 – nothing to do with Covid19.
I am now hoping that those who silenced the alternatives put forward by the likes of Sunetra Gupta and other eminent scientists and medics to at least have to answer for their actions if not face penalties.
India may have a case fatality rate of 1.42%, but its infection fatality rate will be a fraction of that and lower than most Western countries. Indeed, as the author points out, “sero-surveys conducted between December and January found that about a fifth of Indians have been exposed to the virus already — up to every second or third person in the big cities”. A fifth would be 280m people. Even allowing for under-reporting of Covid deaths, it is clear that the IFR is low in India as it is in many African countries and East Asia. Despite this, there is a huge momentum, driven in large part by Bill Gates, GAVI & WHO, to vaccinate the world against Covid.
The West’s response to this pandemic smacks of self-interest. It is widely accepted that the knock-on effects of lockdowns and our response to the virus will be the loss of millions of livelihoods and lives across poorer countries. But instead of asking how best we can help them, we have already decided that what they need is a Covid vaccine. It doesn’t matter that they may not have ready access to clean water or adequate food or be exposed to far deadlier illnesses, a Covid jab will cure their plight.
Unfortunately, this pandemic has highlighted how fragile our societies are, not just from the threat of the virus but how quickly we have accepted authoritarian top-down control. We are seeing livelihoods, freedoms and many things that we had previously taken for granted, and worked hard for, being swept away. We are told it is for the greater good, but how can that be when more lives will be lost through our response to the virus than from the disease itself?
‘We are told it is for the greater good, but how can that be when more lives will be lost through our response to the virus than from the disease itself?’
It is for the ‘greater good’ of Bill Gates and his shady partners, not least the pharma companies. Everyone else is irretrievably damaged.
the amount of mischief that can be done “for the greater good” is staggering. It’s almost as the greater good is more like the good of a select few who count on people to judge intentions over results.
Well said.
Urban India’s generally lax public hygiene may be a factor.
Put in more simple terms, the average Indian’s immune system gets a better workout on a day-to-day basis than the typical westerner who is forever reaching for the nearest hand sanitizer. Add to that a population that skews young and you have good conditions for a minimized outbreak. The numbers will appear large because of the billion people who live there.
Spot on.
And the virus doesn’t seem to like hot weather and, in hot climates, life is lived much more outdoors.
It is now clear that over the full period of the spread of the disease lockdowns do NOT save lives – over the full period, nations that do not lockdown do not have a higher Covid death rate than nations that do. So all the suffering, and death, that lockdowns have caused and will cause (in India – and elsewhere) has not saved lives – it has just served the political agenda of an international establishment (the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organisation, with its Ethiopian Marxist head – who does whatever the People’s Republic of China tells him to do, and all the rest) who never did care about saving lives, they only care about creating “Stakeholder Capitalism” (a Corporate State – vast government joined-at-the-the-hip with a few vast “pet” corporations) in the name of “Sustainable Development”.
Of course it’s easy to judge, but if I were an aspiring expedient politician…
…using extreme, untried measures to tackle what is essentially an acute novel problem to conspicuously save relatively few lives at the entirely predictable vast expense of creating an immeasurably far, far worse chronic problem long into the future, likely resulting in the immiseration and many more less neatly attributable deaths of otherwise healthy, productive people….
…is a plan of action that would make perfect sense to me.
Forcibly remove people’s freedoms and livelihoods, deny them access to their families and friends even as they are dying, disrupt education and destroy businesses, prevent travel and basic human contact…bombard everyone with a relentless programme of fear…then hold out the possibility of restoring some sort of decent life, but with certain conditions – the vast majority will readily accept conditions they’d never normally agree to (such as compulsory medication) in order to put an end to the nightmare. It’s called behavioural psychology, and it clearly works.
India’s lockdown ( and many other European countries & countries worldwide) seemed to have been a kneejerk reaction to the UK’s . It all seemed to have started with the disastrous Ferguson prediction. It seemed to have unwittingly influenced many. It goes to show that most leaders are not capable of independent though and leadership skills. In the absence of any other scenario, UK too fell in line with China strategy . It’s a shame that besides a couple of small countries, no one was brave enough to call it out.
The result of these methods of Covid battling strategy will certainly be that the real monster is let out of its box. The global machinery has been reset. This is what GBD perhaps foresaw on a global scale. It will pour down hardest on the poorest of the poor and any gains ( if any) will be minimal compared to enormity of losses yet to be seen. India is feeling the pain of it’s own lockdown now but it is likely to become much more severe from the lockdowns of the West in the years to come.
China never locked down! They did their show in Wuhan, then carried on as usual. But I agree with your statement: ‘UK too fell in line with China strategy’.
The strategy to destroy the West economy and get the West to take its eyes off how it was rampaging throughout the world, even buying up much of the West.
Worldometrers, China, 3 deaths per million, UK 1810, India 113. This is a disease with a target.
First Boris and Trump said herd immunity, which was the same response, but the Left backed by the perfidious MSM changed that to the biggest self harm in human history, Lockdown.
The lesson? WE ARE NOT IN THIS TOGETHER. In the West this is imposed by the ones with guaranteed wages and no worries their children will miss vital education as they are bright and educated enough to get by. Everyone else is no interest, even our own nations well being.
Do lockdowns save lives ? This is open to debate as we have seen, but what we have not seen and maybe will never see are the knock-on effects of it … the increases is marital and child abuse, the increase is alcohol and drug use, the knock-on effects from the increase in obesity, the economic pain of lost jobs and the psychological damage of weeks of solitude. The infection numbers may be falling but other tragedies are in the pipeline.
Take person years, the loss of human life years (missed medical, deaths of despair, depression, drink, drugs, reduced years by reduced economics, and so on, hundreds of thousands reduced employability from lost, never to be regained – education, lost jobs, bankruptcy, poverty) is much higher because of lockdown, likely magnitudes higher, than saved by it.
Lockdown could be described as the theft of the years of life of the impoverished youth for the wealthy elderly. Except, it’s not even this, as even the elderly have to pay for this beneficence with solitude; isolation and increased risk of deterioration.
It’s very difficult to make any kind of possitive case for this departure from evidenced based pandemic management into uncharted social experimental action.
I no longer call myself a lockdown sceptic as such – as that would imply I think a debate about the efficacy of lockdowns to control a virus is worth having.
Instead, I simply find these control measures ethically indefensible; a line we should not cross even in the name of controlling a virus. Who ever is right or wrong about r numbers, IFRs, second waves etc. doesn’t matter.
Surely the damage done means we can’t allow this response to ever be repeated and we must move heaven and Earth to avoid them in the face of future, similar threats?
I am not excusing lockdowns. There is no scientific evidence that they work. But, in my view governments all over the world have acted absolutely disgracefully, killing civil liberties…And of course the poorest suffer most. The article should I think put the Indian response in the context of how badly basically every country has handled the situation.
Youtube, Gov. Kristi Noem, the South Dakota Governor talks at CPAC. SD was the ONLY state which did NOT lockdown, and had good outcomes and Jobs grew, not dropped, and did great. No One mentioned them, but the Florida/California, Sweden/EU Belarus/Germany are known (211 Belarus, no lockdown – 849 Germany, deaths per million)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y750zcVhOq4
I continue to be surprised to read reports about India’s experience with the virus that make no mention of Vitamin D deficiency and its association with poorer Covid-19 outcomes. This deficiency commonly occurs in colder seasons in places above the 35th degree of latitude and weakens human immune systems and their resistance to viral infection. Almost all of India lies below this latitude, so why are people so puzzled at India’s better outcome?
I am not a doctor or a scientist, so you should read this letter from more than 200 scientists and doctors urging more action on the Vitamin D front.
Florida goes South from 31 Latitude, and I know those people spend lot of time in the sun. A recent comprehensive study did not indicate vitamin D as a panacea, not even found it mattered much.
China and USA are basically at the same Latitude, 30-50 and the Chinese had 3 deaths per million to USA 1593, USA having 530 to 1 more deaths per million than China.
Brazil had 1256 deaths per million to India’s 113, the sun is not the issue.
I wouldn’t trust any covid data coming out of China. Studies in Spain and Israel do show a strong association between D deficiency and poor covid outcomes. Association isn’t causality, of course. Agree about Brazil, though. Maybe not a panacea but an important role. It needs more study and reliable data, but Big Pharma won’t fund studies because correcting D deficiency is dirt cheap, so thin profit margins.
Millions always suffer in India. The claim to be a democracy wears thin for anyone who lives there. A democracy involves more than a vote, something which India does not understand.