Nearly 2,000 infants die in India every day, from preventable, malnutrition and hygiene-related causes. In light of this, the paranoia around Covid-19 causing the death of the old and comorbid, and the status of the disease as a public health issue of unforeseen scale, have been both intellectually dishonest and morally abhorrent.
In the early months of 2020 following the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic, news pages were filled with Covid-related infection and morbidity numbers, every human activity had undergone some change, if not altogether stopped, and mortal fear has gripped much of the world. Based on my understanding of other dangers faced by common people, especially in India, the fear seemed excessive.So I started looking at some data. As of 30 April 2020, there were only 1,154 Covid-19 deaths in India, a densely populated country with about 1.35 billion people, and nearly 30,000 normal deaths per day. It was also clear that the low death count was not due to lockdown, as social distancing is meaningless in the densely packed slums of Mumbai (the city where I live). I knew several people from such slums, but I was not hearing of any horrid tales of epidemic-scale deaths from there.
