"We've killed it," drawls a grand client at a fancy hairdresser in Delhi. "Covid came to India but we were so grubby and diseased it just bounced off, rolled over and died." The hyperbole elicits a round of chuckles, as it was meant to.
Such glibness might seem tasteless, considering an official national death toll of nearly 160,000, as well as ominous signs that India is on the cusp of a second wave that its vaccination drive may be too slow to suppress. Yet as a share of its nearly 1.4bn people, the tally is minuscule, despite a huge outbreak.
A national survey of blood samples suggests that by December some 22% of Indians had been exposed to covid-19, 30 times the official tally of around 11m cases to date. If that estimate is right and if India's fatality rate had been as high as, say, Britain's, there would have been some 10m deaths.
The Economist | Getting off lightly
https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/03/13/india-seems-to-have-suffered-surprisingly-few-deaths-from-covid-19?frsc=dg%7Ce
https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/03/13/india-seems-to-have-suffered-surprisingly-few-deaths-from-covid-19?frsc=dg%7Ce
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