The world is watching India with bated breath
PremiumWe dropped 10 ranks this month to No. 30 on Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience chart and have the world on edge for numbers and mutations that could prolong this pandemic. We can’t slip up
India’s dramatic loss of covid control this month is more than just an abject lesson in the perils of letting our guard down. It is also a portent of a pandemic prolonged—to the dismay of everyone. By international comparison, our resistance to the scourge in its first year was remarkable for neither its strength nor weakness. But this April, we dropped 10 slots on the chart of Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking for the month, released earlier this week. Of the 53 countries tracked, India is at No. 30 now. Singapore dislodged New Zealand to take the top spot, while Australia held its third rank and Israel moved one notch higher to No. 4. These are widely considered the safest places to be on the planet. The unsafest by this assessment is Brazil, though the worst performer on the latest chart is Turkey, which tumbled 19 positions to No. 46. France did poorly too. That other nations have fared worse than India on this list of the world’s largest economies, however, doesn’t mean we can cut ourselves some slack, figuratively or otherwise. We have the world worried—and for good reason.
Size matters. And India is enormously populous. This magnifies the scale of our health emergency and elongates the time we might potentially take to overcome it. Bloomberg’s ranking uses size only as an inclusion criterion. Its chart is based on a formula that estimates national resilience, as reflected in index scores calculated for each of the 53 countries’ success at containing the virus while causing the least social and economic disruption. As inputs, it uses official data (up till 25 April in this case), and these are standardized rather than absolute numbers. So, on some parameters, we have done better than a few higher ranked countries. The 137 deaths we recorded per million people, for instance, is a figure far lower than the 734 logged by Israel, a small country that has vaccinated a significant chunk of its population and achieved a semblance of social normalcy already. India also looks fairly okay on Bloomberg’s tally of one-month cases per 100,000, with a figure of 349, far lower than the 595 reported for America, which is at No. 17 overall. What has dragged India down the order is our high positivity rate for covid tests (17.8%), a sign of inadequate testing, plus a low proportion of people covered so far by vaccines (5.1%). As the index used for this ranking focuses on broad outcomes, it does not take sundry scarcities into account.
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2 min read . 29 Apr 2021For a sense of why India is currently in the global spotlight, we need to look beyond our rank. Take the mortality and daily-infection graphs of the world. Eerily, these have begun to resemble ours. So large are the country’s counts, that the sharpness of this year’s global upshoot now depends heavily on the pace of contagion here. Unless we manage to flatten our infection curve, the worldwide trajectory of the pandemic will soon be tracing India’s. And if the quality of Indian data has frayed the nerves of analysts at one level, an alarm has arisen at another over virus variants zipping ahead of vaccinations. Though this problem is not peculiar to India, the infectious ‘double-mutant’ variant detected here has struck other countries, where people are nervous about whether it can dodge vaccine shots. Other corona mutations have occurred, too, but we still don’t have sufficient clarity on what this implies. All said, the onus we bear has never been greater. For our own sake, as much as the world’s, we must get a grip of this crisis.
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