The Political Fix: As brutal Covid-19 second wave moves into rural India, Modi deploys spin doctors

Welcome to The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox every week, sign up here. If you missed our Q&A last week, we spoke to Murali Neelakantan and Ashish Kulkarni on the mess that is India’s vaccine policy.

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The Big Story: Askance

The graph of new Covid-19 cases tells us that India may be past the peak of its brutal second wave. The actual news, however, remains dire.

As University of Michigan’s Bhramar Mukherjee put it, “just because we registered 414000 cases, 350000 cases are coming as a relief... We are still reporting the largest number of daily new cases & deaths. Hospitals are overwhelmed & people are dying.”

Indeed, official records showed a death toll of more than 4,000 per day on four occasions in the last week. Despite the direct involvement of the prime minister and a Supreme court, which we wrote about last week, patients are still dying because of a lack of oxygen, with as many as 75 succumbing over the last four days at Goa’s largest Covid facility because of logistical issues.

The crisis is shifting from Delhi, where the positivity rate is steadily falling and…

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