Hello and welcome to The Moving Curve. I’m Rukmini, a data journalist based in Chennai. Two nights a week on this mini-cast, I consider one question around the novel coronavirus epidemic in India. Tonight I’m considering this one — how did we get here and how do we get out?
It’s one year and 105 days since the first novel coronavirus case was detected in India, and we are reporting 24,329,900 confirmed cases and 265,346 reported deaths. It’s been nearly two months since my last episode, and I apologise for this long absence. Many of you wrote to me and called me in the last couple of days to ask if I had been ill, and I apologise for worrying you. The truth is that I, like most of you, I suspect, was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by work, by the numbers, by anxiety about my family, by grief at losing a friend, by the horror of the news, and by the feeling that we were back to 2020 and not just back, but spiralling out of control. But The Moving Curve is back, and I hope not to take such leaves of absence again, not just because I don’t want to let our little community down, but because I mustn’t forget that just as in 2020, this is a space for me to distill the news that comes flooding in each day, and calmly reflect on it. In the coming days, I’ll have some guests on, and I’ll have more to say about vaccines, variants and death statistics.
For this episode, I just wanted to take stock of where we are, why we’re here, and what we can roughly expect.
My piece for IndiaSpend on the vaccine effect is here.
The road is still long, but there’s something of a path now visible. In future episodes we’ll talk about how to get on to that path, and once on it, how to run.
Thank you for listening. This episode was edited by Anand Krishnamoorthi. On the next episode, a new question.
