A Vaccine For The Economy

India can easily convert the corona crisis into an opportunity. Here’s how

- Chetan Bhagat

We have lived with Covid-19 for over six months now. The time elapsed has helped us better understand the virus that confounded most health experts. This also allows us to plan for a post-Covid India, when hopefully the virus would be in control, but we will still have the enormous job of rebuilding our economy.

Here’s what we know about corona now. First, the bad news – Covid is fairly resilient. No other flu virus has ever spread like this in India’s summer heat, for instance. The virus won’t just ‘go away on its own’ as many felt it eventually would. Especially in large, relatively free democracies, containing the virus is a daunting task. In fact, the top three countries with coronavirus cases (the US, Brazil, India) are the world’s top three democracies.

However, there is also some good news. The death rate versus corona positives is lower than originally thought (less than 1%). Since the virus began early this year, global deaths are a little under 7 lakh, at the time of writing this article. While this is a big absolute number, an estimated 3.3 crore people have died this year worldwide, from all possible causes (source: worldometer).

One more positive news about coronavirus is that face masks and social distancing, relatively simpler to implement than full lockdowns, seem to work just as well in containing the spread. Finally, the most positive news is that multiple vaccines are in final, Phase-III trials.