In addition, and in a bid to deal with the crisis, India halted exports of Covid vaccines (it makes a domestic version of the AstraZeneca-University of Oxford shot called "Covishield") and is unlikely to resume any exports until the end of the year.
A member of the prime minister's economic advisory council defended the Modi government as it came under pressure in May, telling CNBC that state governments should have the final say in social restrictions.
Nonetheless, after the U.S., India has the second-highest number of recorded Covid cases in the world, according to Johns Hopkins data, with more than 31.2 million cases and almost 419,000 fatalities.ĭuring the first wave of the pandemic, India went into a nationwide lockdown in March 2020 and this only began to be lifted around June of last year with a series of easing restrictions over the following summer months.Īs the second (and much harder) wave hit earlier in 2021, however, Prime Minister Narendra Modi resisted pressure to reimpose a national lockdown, handing the responsibility to individual states over whether to reimplement restrictions instead. In its latest weekly report on Wednesday, the WHO noted that as of July 20, the prevalence of delta among the specimens sequenced over the past four weeks exceeded 75% in many countries worldwide including Australia, Bangladesh, Botswana, China, Denmark, India, Indonesia, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa and the U.K. The World Health Organization has already warned that, based on the estimated transmission advantage of the delta variant, "it is expected that it will rapidly outcompete other variants and become the dominant circulating lineage over the coming months." Rochelle Walensky, said Tuesday, marking a dramatic rise from 50% the week of July 3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Indeed, the delta variant now makes up 83% of all sequenced cases in the U.S., the director of the U.S. last fall, and has prompted further waves of infections in Europe and an ominous incline in cases in the U.S. The variant has usurped the previously dominant alpha variant, first detected in the U.K.