![]() In this strange time, in light of the carnage that had come before, it was cause for optimism. In any other context save COVID-19, it would have been a depressing scene. I was in a crowded Delhi hospital, seeing people in dire medical need “standing on each other’s heads,” as we say in India. Read just a bit between the lines, and think about what Swaminathan said: Perhaps COVID-19 had, at least in Delhi, literally burned itself out. “Look, whoever was going to get it did.” He walked away. The mouth-breather behind me snickered, dripping some more aerosols on my back. Indians have been getting their jabs at a rate that seems miraculous in Germany, where uptake has dwindled alarmingly. “Delhi has been good with the vaccination drive.” What caused the dip, I asked the assistant? He had been on the front line. A stranger in an ill-fitting mask coughed on my shoulder as he listened to our conversation. His hospital had practically no COVID-19 patients currently. I spoke with a doctor’s assistant as we waited outside the specialists’ offices (standing room only). The private hospital we went to was packed to anxiety-inducing levels. I went to Delhi in part because my father required a medical procedure. Finding a bed in those wards a few months ago had been literally a matter of life and death. It was apparent, by August, that there was plenty of space in the city’s COVID-19 wards. The events of April and May had led to the buildup of distrust between citizenry and government, but the one thing government couldn’t do, everyone agreed, was fudge the number of people in hospitals. Because of her own credibility, Swaminathan’s testimony (hedged as it was with various caveats, including India’s “heterogeneity”) bore out what most people were seeing around them. The interview was widely quoted and shared at the time and contributed to a sense of wary optimism wherever people were gathering, whether virtually or in person. “We’re not seeing the kind of exponential growth and peaks that we saw a few months ago,” she said. The rates of transmission, outside of a few outlier states ( Kerala, for example), were moderate. In a late August interview with an Indian media outlet, Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, remarked, “Perhaps we are entering some kind of stage of endemicity.” The larger context was one of a stable R number (at or below 1) and numbers that were receding week on week. People have no choice but to be resilient. But things are fluid, situations are dynamic, and restaurants have to reopen. ![]() Time feels compressed, to the extent that you think nothing is changing or ever will. The horrors of April and May seemed so recent.īut that is the nature of this pandemic. The first few days there, I thought it was insane. It was as if the entire city had shaken off the terror and decided life had to carry on. I was prepared for many things but not people in restaurants, busy malls, full planes to holiday destinations. I wouldn’t have been able to visit otherwise. I knew things were qualitatively different since the surge of the previous months. I finally got to New Delhi in mid-August. My father, my sisters, and their families live there. The situation in the city had a personal urgency for me. Among other reasons, this was because so much of India’s reporting happens there. New Delhi seemed the epicenter of the surge in the press. My phone lit up with frantic pleas for plasma, remdesivir, ivermectin-all those discredited magic bullets people at the ends of their tethers turned to when they saw their loved ones slipping away.Īs in India, so in its capital. I watched in horror as the deaths mounted in India. Sirens ringing through the night, crematoriums stretched beyond capacity, dead bodies dumped in rivers because there wasn’t enough space to burn them or wood to burn them with. In April and May of this year, Armageddon seemed at hand there. It was my first visit to the country of my birth since the pandemic began. I returned to Germany in September after a few weeks in India.
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