'This Is a Catastrophe.' In India, Illness Is Everywhere.

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COMMENT: 'I’m sitting in my apartment waiting to catch the disease.'

A coronavirus-positive patient and relative wait in an ambulance for admission to a hospital in Delhi, India, April 24, 2021.

India is now recording more infections per day — as many as 350,000 — than any other country has since the pandemic began, and that’s just the official number, which most experts think is a vast underestimation. Although New Delhi is locked down, the disease is still rampaging. Doctors across this city and some of Delhi’s top politicians are issuing desperate SOS calls to India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, on social media and on TV, begging for oxygen, medicine, help.Experts had always warned that COVID-19 could wreak real havoc in India. This country is enormous — 1.4 billion people. And densely populated. And in many places, very poor.

As a foreign correspondent for nearly 20 years, I’ve covered combat zones, been kidnapped in Iraq and been thrown in jail in more than a few places. My part of town, South Delhi, is now hushed. Like many other places, we had a strict lockdown last year. But now doctors here are warning us that the virus is more contagious, and the chances of getting help are so much worse than they were during the first wave. So many of us are scared to step outside, like there’s some toxic gas we’re all afraid to breathe.

I was out reporting in January and February, driving through towns in central India. No one — and I mean no one, including police officers — was wearing a mask. It was like the country had said to itself, while the second wave was looming: Don’t worry, we got this.

 

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