Skip to content
Subscriber Only
Opinion
David Fickling

The Pandemic Will Be More Deadly This Year

Consider the surging case count in India. A false sense of complacency is discouraging any course correction, and numbers could get worse still. 

A hope and a prayer.

A hope and a prayer.

Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg
Updated on

Covid-19 is going to kill more people in 2021 than it did last year. If you want to see why, look at what’s happening in India.

Cases have been surging in the country of 1.37 billion people. On Sunday alone, 261,500 new infections were recorded. That’s as bad as the U.S. during all but the worst five days of the pandemic in December and early January. Case counts are rising far more quickly, too. Average infection numbers over the past seven days have run at nearly three times the level two weeks ago, a pace of growth that the U.S. last saw in the early days of the outbreak a year ago.