HALF A WORLD AWAY — I was 2-and-a-half years old the first time I visited my relatives in South India, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. My favorite aunt, my mom's brother's wife, likes to tell the story of how I leapt into her arms from the train when it stopped in Guntur even though I had just met her. She and my uncle were supposed to visit Texas, where two of their three children live, in May after their second Covid vaccine dose. They have yet to meet their youngest grandchild. But their shots have been delayed, writes Renu. And India now has the highest daily case counts in the world. The country recorded more than a million cases and nearly 6,000 deaths over the last week. India's current Covid surge has pushed it past Brazil to make it the country with the second highest total Covid cases, after the U.S. I'm not sure when I will see my aunt and uncle — or any of my other Indian relatives — again. I have often wondered how the world's second most populous country, one with an underdeveloped health care system, incomprehensible poverty levels and lots of crowds managed to fare better than the U.S. during the pandemic. I thought whatever it was — probably a young population and open-air homes — would keep much of the country's more than 1.3 billion people mostly safe, especially with vaccines being rolled out. Instead, lethal new virus variants have emerged during the country's festival, wedding and regional election season — along with deep pandemic fatigue, a slow vaccine rollout and entrenched vaccine skepticism. Last year most of the country was under a strict lockdown, rarely allowed to leave the house. For months my dad's brother in the South Indian town of Ongole would have to finish the day's shopping by 9 a.m. for the entire household, which includes my grandmother, my aunt, my cousin and her two school-age daughters. Domestic help like cooks and maids, common in many middle- and upper-class Indian households, were prohibited from coming to their house to help out. But now the country is at the other end of the social distancing extreme. More than 2 million Hindus bathed in the Ganga River Monday during the Kumbh Mela festival in Haridwar, a North Indian city near the foothills of the Himalayas. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government refused to cancel the festival, rebuffing requests of public health officials for fear of upsetting Hindu loyalists. And Hindus across the country will celebrate their New Year this week — including the Telugu New Year, Ugadi, that my family celebrates. Maharashtra, the Indian state with the highest case rate, has imposed a lockdown for the next two weeks, but there's no nationwide measures as severe as last year. Even without the festivals, Indians are just pretending that the pandemic is over, an older cousin in Hyderabad told me over WhatsApp. Schools are closed there, she said, but movie theaters, shopping malls and outdoor markets are packed. "Dear Renu, it's horrible here," she texted me. Another younger cousin in Hyderabad got Covid a couple of weeks ago, likely from her husband who had to start going to his office in Bangalore. Rupali Limaye's relatives in Mumbai were invited to a 1,000 person wedding. They didn't go. "It's bananas to me," Limaye, director of Behavioral and Implementation Science at the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University, said of the country's Covid caseload, which is expected to double in the next couple of months. Already two new variants have been found in India, Chunhuei Chi, director of the Center for Global Health at Oregon State University, told me. One of the variants, which is probably contributing to fast-rising Covid cases in Maharashtra, has two different mutations, raising the chances that it could escape the vaccine's defenses. In one New Delhi hospital, 37 doctors tested positive for Covid after receiving two vaccine doses. "India needs to contain this quickly," Chi said. Then there's the reality of vaccinating more than 1.3 billion people. India has already administered more than 100 million Covid vaccine doses and as of April 1, everyone over 45 has been eligible for a vaccine. But only about 1 percent of the country has been fully vaccinated. Public health experts estimate that the country will need to triple its vaccination rate in order to make a dent in mortality rates in the next few months. The country has halted exports of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the Covid therapy remdesivir in order to meet domestic demand. The country approved Russia's Sputnik V vaccine for emergency use this week, but officials are struggling to overcome vaccine misinformation spreading rapidly through WhatsApp and other social media sites. My dad is still trying to convince his brother to get their 88-year-old mom, my grandmother, vaccinated. She had my dad when she was 16, and they are close. My dad makes the trip from Atlanta to Ongole once a year to see her. Last year my parents managed to leave India days before the lockdowns began. He was planning a trip to see his mom in November. Now he's not so sure he can anymore.
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