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India is absolutely fucked by corona this time around. https://www.ft.com/content/683914a3-134f-40b6-989b-21e0ba1dc403 (if link doesn't work: https://t.co/YN1et2iNlY ) > Narendra Modi, prime minister, and his Bharatiya Janata party have been accused of prioritising domestic politics over public health by holding mass political rallies with thousands of people and allowing the Kumbh Mela, a vast religious festival attended by millions, to take place during the second wave. > “Health systems weren’t better prepared for it this time around. Many people in the administration across the country did not expect that there would be a ‘this time around’,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, a charity. “It was somehow presumed that we had passed the pandemic.” > The sick are overwhelming hospitals in many parts of the country. The rate of ICU patients in Nagpur at 353 per million is higher than it was anywhere in Europe during the pandemic. Mumbai, the financial capital, has 194 ICU patients per million. > A Financial Times analysis also points to under-reporting of deaths. Local news reports for seven districts across the states of Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar show that while at least 1,833 people are known to have died of Covid-19 in recent days, based mainly on cremations, only 228 have been officially reported. > In the Jamnagar district in Gujarat, 100 people died of Covid-19 but only one Covid death was reported. > The situation in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, a state of 200m that is among India’s poorest, highlights how health infrastructure has been pushed to breaking point. Local media reported that at King George’s Medical University, there was a queue of 50 people per hospital bed. > Amit Shah, India’s home minister, told the Indian Express that Modi and the government were “ready, fighting against [the virus] on every front . . . I am confident that we will have a victory over this”. > But Vineeta Bal, of the National Institute of Immunology, said the roots of the crisis ran much deeper, exposing years of neglect of public health infrastructure. India’s spending on healthcare has long lagged behind global peers. > “This is my major problem with not just the current government but the government healthcare system of the past 50 years,” she said. “That’s not going to be solvable in one year when there’s a crisis. This is a steady neglect of many, many years.” > Santosh Kumar, the son of a BJP leader in Lucknow, has been isolating at home with his family, all four of whom have Covid. > “The entire system has broken down,” he said. “Every other person in the administration here is quarantining. People are finding out from each other what medication to take and doing what they can.”