The World Finally Woke Up to India’s Virus Nightmare

martyb and an anonymous coward write:

India's surging coronavirus cases should have been a loud wake-up call. Sure, the enormous spike in cases this spring came as a surprise. Just months before, an earlier rise in daily cases had dropped mysteriously, and India, home to some of the world's biggest vaccine manufacturers, seemed well primed for mass immunization.

But that changed weeks ago, in mid-March, when cases ticked up but vaccinations did not. By April, daily cases had topped 100,000, higher than they had ever reached in 2020. Soon, they were more than triple that, setting a record for any nation on Earth and accounting for more than 39 percent of all new cases globally. India's death toll is nearing 200,000, even with serious allegations of undercounting.

The rapid rise of infections seems to have come from the perfect storm of fast-spreading variants, slow vaccination and relaxed restrictions that public health experts had warned about. And yet for what seemed like an agonizingly long time, it appeared that much of the world was sleeping on it.

As countries like the United States began to see the positive results of mass vaccination programs, Indians took to social media to detail shortages of supplies needed to make vaccines and lifesaving supplies like oxygen. Alarming stories of a new, potentially more infectious virus strain called B. 1.617 flooded global headlines.

Only last week did the world take serious action, with countries from Britain to the United Arab Emirates promising oxygen generators or ventilators.

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