It’s been almost 15 months since for the first time India went under a national lockdown, in March 2020, to control the spread of Covid-19. So what has happened between now and then? Countries launched unprecedented efforts to develop and deploy vaccines. The West has done a commendable job in vaccinating their populations using a combination of Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and J&J jabs. The Rest have dawdled and dithered in formulating their Covid-19 response, leaving millions dead and several hundred million to cope with the economic and social impact of the pandemic.
The West despite vaccinating its population with alacrity has been myopic in shouldering its responsibility to tackle Covid-19. The global nature of the virus necessitates a global response, not a localized one. Vaccines are working; America, Israel, the UK have all gone back to varying levels of normalcy. Though masking restrictions are still in place in certain jurisdictions, the gloom of last year has been mitigated to a larger extent. However, it would still be too early to stream down the confetti and have a victory parade. The mutations of the virus could still do undo the monumental efforts undertaken to tackle the same.
Cases of the Delta variant are being detected all over the world even with all the travel restrictions and quarantine measures in place. The virus finds a way to spread its heinous tentacles. It is clear that till the time a majority of the world population is vaccinated, Covid-19 and its variants would continue to be a public health emergency. While the developed world has been myopic and self-serving in tackling the pandemic, the developing world hasn’t helped its case. The poster boy of mishandling the pandemic has been India, where the second wave of the pandemic at one point caused 6000 deaths a day. Despite being the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines, India faced severe vaccine shortage. The Indian government failed to ramp up vaccine manufacturing capacities even though it was becoming increasingly clear that mass vaccination was the only effective to counter the pandemic spread.
Further it is becoming increasingly clear that pre-covid normalcy, moving in the public sphere without a mask, is still some time away. While vaccinations have drastically reduced deaths and hospitalization levels, the risk of infection hasn’t such a slide; in the UK, while deaths have flat lined, new variants of the virus are causing a spike in the number of Covid-19 cases. The virus even with full vaccination isn’t going away any time soon. Need to stay vigilant and alert till the time virus is defeated
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