Now for a plan

State govts would play a critical role in vaccine distribution

Addressing a group of chief ministers on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned that another stage of the Covid-19 pandemic was upon India, and that vigilance needed to be increased. He called for state-level steering committees and also for more localised task forces to examine local breakouts and prevent them from becoming full-fledged outbreaks, and reiterated that the state governments should move away from a dependence on imprecise rapid antigen testing to the gold standard RT-PCR tests for infection. He compared India’s predicament to the risk of drowning in shallow water close to the shore, given the recent news about