The long and winding road towards normalcy

India’s three great obsessions acted as super spreaders for COVID-19: politics, cricket, and religion. The matches in Ahmedabad against England, religious festivals and election rallies. There is some

India’s three great obsessions acted as super spreaders for COVID-19: politics, cricket, and religion. The matches in Ahmedabad against England, religious festivals and election rallies. There is something disingenuous about our leaders exhorting us to wear masks and avoid gatherings when they are addressing large crowds most of whom wear no masks. The Kumbh Mela saw seven sages and 300 pilgrims testing positive for COVID-19 at the start. The government has COVID protocols in place. But over a million people gather every day and five million on special days. The imagination boggles. We are so busy patting ourselves on the back for successes real and imaginary that we ignore proper data collection and interpretation. We take credit for developing the Oxford-Astra Zeneca vaccine simply because it is being produced at the Serum Institute in Pune.