How India’s second wave became the worst COVID-19 surge in the world

New Delhi (National Geographic)---   During the past few weeks, Indian social media has been inundated with SOS messages: hospitals tweeting about dwindling oxygen supplies and physicians watching helplessly as patients perish from preventable deaths. A journalist pleading for but denied a hospital bed took to Twitter to log his deteriorating condition till he died.

Overwhelmed crematoria are working round-the-clock to keep up with the pace of bodies; furnaces have melted down from overuse and additional funeral platforms are being built outside. Such are the heartbreaking messages and haunting images that highlight the formidable second wave of the coronavirus pandemic raging through the country.

India broke the world record for the most new coronavirus cases this week, surpassing 330,000 new cases on Friday, as deaths in the past 24 hours jumped to a record 2,263, the health ministry said. The United States held the previous one-day record with 300,669 new cases recorded on January 8, 2021.

We completely let down our guard and assumed in January that the pandemic was over—and COVID surveillance and control took a back seat,” says K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. But “there were still a fairly large proportion of people in the big cities, but also in smaller cities and villages, who were not exposed to the virus last year, who were susceptible.”

As cases declined from September 2020 to mid-February 2021, the Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ignored warnings of a second wave, despite the fact that new variants were identified as far back as in January, according to media reports. ...

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